Has reality struck for you yet? Halfway through tertiary education, your first job, or maybe your second, you begin to comprehend the scale of the world.
Life might have been hard at some point, but by the grace of your parents, family and friends, you have survived. Congratulations. And now, left contemplating what is remotely worth doing apart from days of blissful ignorance your adulthood no longer affords you, the conclusion gradually becomes clear: you are the work you do.
The first chance of a proper break surfaces. You grab it: taking a 9-day double-weekend trip out of town somewhere…anywhere really…but where? What would satiate that hollow feeling?
You might begin to discover your love of nature. That grand old thing. Not like ephemeral, blurry drink parties or food that lasts ten seconds on the tongue. These are the solid folk — the bastions — the trees, the earth, the smell of grass and the minty morning breeze. When one grazes the face of Nature, a wonderment sets in, and it calms the soul. We recognize the time-tested centuries of the moment we live in today.
A word of caution: it might become a habit.
Because we all gravitate to things of value, and the natural environment encompasses so much of what we wish we were and tells the tale of what we wish we weren’t. (The alternating 5 W’s if you caught the alliteration.)
We go again and again. We haven’t found what we wanted to do in life. We haven’t found a legacy ‘worthy’ of being left behind by us. We are snooty folk. We are worth more.
So we hike. We travel. Anything to get closer to understanding the world around us. Somewhere in there might be the sentiment that the world we expose ourselves to might just impart the piece of ourselves we are looking for. At least we try.
