What the wilderness demonstrates - namely for someone not accustomed to wilderness spaces - is the centrality of certainty as a state of mind to action and activity. This demonstration occurs through a contrast between the familiar and unfamiliar.
If one is unfamiliar with the terrain, and unfamiliar with subsisting in the terrain, a given stretch of land travel can seem like an eternity. This is because in modern human environments, one becomes accustomed to setting symbolic ends and judging abstract quantities. How long will this take? How many miles of travel is it and how fast is one moving? By habituating oneself to these measurements and actions, one becomes comfortable with how long something will take and how much travel is required, and if one knows what one is doing, or is with someone who knows what they are doing, then the mind is at rest or at least certain.
This is due in part to the nature of modern transportation, which has become highly regularized, systematized, and organized, which allows the attention to drift to abstract and objectified quantities like time and and distance. Even this is changing of course, and there are regular exceptions; uncertainty in the built environment is a very interesting topic of its own, but for now I'd like to continue on to the wilderness.
These measurements and timeframes can break down in the wild, as navigating the wild is not the same as navigating a built environment, especially if one is not traveling with someone with the knowledge and experience of navigating a given region of wilderness. Learning how to navigate can take more time, and so this muddies the symbolic picture, and the subjective experience of that picture.
Even a mile of travel in uncertain terrain can become daunting. Is one going in the right direction? Every step one takes without catching sight of a readily identifiable landmark or destination begins to raise doubt and consternation.
This doubt and consternation can quickly build into fear and panic, especially if one is actually lost, which greatly lowers the efficiency and effectiveness of one's navigation. Restoring certainty here takes the redirection of one's attention from definite and measurable quantities of time and distance - though some of this can be mediated with a map and compass - and towards the learning of navigational skills and the development of sensory faculties of navigation, and the placing of one's trust in those subjective experiences, for starters.
