Re-wilding Myself: How My Hunger for More Led to a Life with Less
For thirty years, I craved more. Only after many years of self-work and self-discovery did I realize that they key to my happiness was less.
I live three and a half hours away from a city. The nearest town with a stoplight is an hour’s drive through mountain canyons and over an 11,000ft pass. In the winter, it’s impassable most of the time without four-wheel drive. Amazon Prime takes a week, usually, and sometimes more with the shipping delays caused by Covid. We’re a tiny town of 2,000 mountain folks at the end of the road. Life here isn’t convenient. It certainly isn’t easy, and that’s just fine with me. Life here is wild.
Growing up, life was about convenience. Convenience meant success because it meant you could afford to live in, or close to, a city center. With that convenience came accumulation. Like many of you — I suspect — raised by boomer parents, life was about the suburbs: safe streets lined every few feet by fluorescent lamps that kept us safe. Pizza delivery made us fat but it was easy enough to work late if you could call and have dinner on the table within thirty minutes. Neighbors close by provided a sense of security and a built-in community.
