900 miles from the North Pole: living outside your comfort zone
According to the German philosopher, Heidegger, a person, living in an environment of physical comfort (Umwelt), is poor in the world (Weltarm). I wonder what percentage of people have any idea what this ‘poverty’ really amounts to?
Big city life coddles us with all its 24-hours possibility where we can get everything we need (where even our slightest whims are immediately catered for). What would it be like to put all those little desires to one aside and to fend for yourself for a year in an Arctic cabin?
Before you go to see what another life might be like, count how many times we experience nowadays a non-digital life. Not many. Artificial Reality replaces Reality everywhere when the internet and digital technology stream into our lives 24/7. Perhaps the creature comforts of our high-speed, complicated urban lives have stolen from us what is in fact the most precious of all.
Just imagine living on your own for a year and using nature as your bread-basket. Imagine if that place is on the edge of the Ice Sheet in the High Arctic in the most remote settlement you can find, just 900 miles from the North Pole. Imagine living without running water, waste drainage and no internet. Imagine living in a place with no roads between the settlements, no cars, no trees, no machines of any kind. Your only way out of the settlement: dog sled over the sea ice. The sun there goes down for the last time in October and only reappears above the horizon in February, but from mid-April to mid-August, there is twenty-four-hour sunlight. You will either sleep 12 hours a day, constantly exhausted from the permanent darkness or you will have non-stop insomnia for 4 months.
The place is real and is called Savissivik. You can find this tiny, extraordinary place in the far north-west corner of Greenland — a huddle of cabins on the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet. There, winter temperatures are as low as minus forty-five degrees Celsius. Up until 1818, the locals that live there believed they were the only people on the planet. It was only when Sir John Ross came looking for the Northwest Passage that their Romantic worldview was ruined.
Some months ago in a cozy cafe right in the center of one of the biggest and most comfortable cities in the world, I met this traveller who some years ago spent a year living in this small settlement in the Arctic. Why? Well, he just wanted to find out what life might be like if people chose another path. What would be life like if we stepped off completely from the digital conveyor belt? He lived in a community of 40 Inuit hunters,18 of them were bachelors. They were bachelors because they had chosen the freedom and solitude of the tiny settlement over the thrills of the town (population 600), 120 miles away. Quite simply, they wanted to carry on living the old way — they loved the sense of self-reliance that the hunting life offered them. Their wives sometimes saw things differently.
For many years, this traveller, Steve, had wanted to leave our congested, complicated world behind and experience the joys of a simple life living as close to nature as possible. In the Arctic, he discovered a different kind of life entirely, a slow life where there was always a sense of ‘living on the edge’, a sense of constant vulnerability. He knew months of darkness, months of constant sunlight, mistrust, freedom, adventure, happiness, a whole catalogue of frustrations and finally the shock of his old life which seemed unsustainable and apart from nature. Every evening, snuggled up in his sleeping bag, he read aloud some poems. How often do you read poems aloud before going to sleep? I am sure more often you scroll your Instagram feed and fall asleep with an unconscious feeling of comparing your life with the lives of other strangers.
To tell a long story short, I recommend that you read Steve’s diary «Annals of Solitude: A Year in the hut in the Arctic». This extraordinary book is the record of his journal for that year living in the Inuit settlement.
I suppose sometimes you will feel lonely (if you have the ability to empathize with the author) but solitude is quite different from loneliness and I can guarantee that you will never be bored.
If you fancy a spot of digital detox, if you sometimes crave to try living a completely different life, then this is definitely the book for you to read.
