Outdoorism

I can feel the colors out there changing. Each day is different. It’s impossible to catch more than we miss, but it’s fun to try!

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Most of us cannot live an entirely outdoor life, even if we like to dream about it. If our passion is strong, perhaps we venture outdoors for months at a time, but in my case at least, this is preceded by many more months of indoor preparation. There is a dynamic interplay between our indoor lives and our outdoor lives. The things we do indoors tend to enhance our outdoor experience in some ways, and degrade it in others. The opposite is also true. I believe this duality lies at the heart of outdoorism. It certainly provides new insights into my life struggles at every turn.

The duality can be seen at almost any level. It’s fun to come up with widely varying examples. Most have both a constructive side and destructive side. Let’s explore a few.

A single outing. The outing is planned indoors. Perhaps maps are used from an organization that supports outdoor conservation. During the trip, an intriguing encounter inspires an idea for another outing. On the destructive side, perhaps a lunch is packed indoors purchased from companies that create pollution. While hiking, a prick from a cactus spine creates a puncture wound that gets infected.

A lifestyle. A person makes her living indoors, but gets her creative energy from outdoor pursuits. Her trade requires the use of non-renewable natural resources, and she sometimes sacrifices good career opportunities to be outdoors more.

A society. Nature provides the resources for an industrial society, which in turn provides citizenry with technology that enables outdoor exploration without the struggles for food and shelter that our ancestors contended with. Meanwhile the industry destroys some of the natural resources that power it, and citizens who have come to value the diversity of nature begin to undermine the industry.

A brain. This perspective is illuminated by the book My Stroke of Insight, a narrative by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. She experienced full right-brain consciousness when the left side of her brain was disabled by a stroke. This was a state of bliss - she was completely absorbed in the present, thrilled with life, at one with the universe. I’ve had hints of this state in the outdoors. Blissful presence was not sufficient for survival, though. Without any capacity to speak or understand language, see distinct objects, perceive her body as a solid separate from other solids, or track the passage of time, Jill couldn’t live in our common world. She had to redevelop her left-brain skills to live, even though she had grown to dislike the left brain’s tendency to dominate thought, worry needlessly, fabricate stories, and sow discontent. These are things I do more when I’m indoors … often in association with making a living.

The common patterns in these different perspectives are often described nicely by the yin and yang of Eastern philsophy, the theory of the unity of opposites. One of the laws of yin and yang is that they are usually out of balance, dominance shifting from one side to the other. Outdoorism is my attempt to compensate for the dominance of the Indoors by emphasizing the Outdoors in my life.

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Until I learned what I truly value, my life was essentially dedicated to the values of others. It was in the outdoors that I discovered the values I feel certain are my own.

We talk about our values all the time, treating them as a given. That’s appropriate, because most of the time I think they are given to us like a pair of Emperor’s Trousers. The real reason that I never pointed out the Emperor’s New Clothes was that I had them on myself, and wasn’t about to point out the fact that I was naked.

Of course I resented being dressed up in this bogus clothing. My first step toward discovery of my own clothes was to rebelliously fling off the clothing that had been foisted on me. In public, for real. Once I was discovered nude outside a formal fraternity dance at the liberal arts college I attended. Festivities before the dance had involved a heated plexiglass dunk tank, the kind where you throw a ball at the target to plunge the clown sitting over the water. It was left outside the hall, and when the gowned and tuxedoed couples emerged after the dance they discovered me having a nice soak, my clothes in a pile on the sidewalk. The next day a beefy frat boy approached me in the dining hall, taking off his glasses. I prepared to have my lights knocked out, but the gentleman instead made a public statement declaring me a “moral deviant”. That’s when I knew I had successfully shed the values that weren’t mine to begin with, but I still hadn’t found any clothes of my own to wear. And the next morning, I got dressed in the same old hand-me-downs again before going out.

The truth is, discovering your own values is like unlocking the Secret of Happiness, deciphering the Meaning of Life, or Finding Yourself. Anyone who claims to have the answer ready for you is probably selling some brand of royal fashions. In my case, no clothes fit me until I went on a journey to find them. A few journeys, actually, all outdoors.

So even though I can’t tell you where you’ll find your perfect pajamas, I did get some insights into the reasons why the outdoors worked for me. I suspect these things may apply to the journeys of others as well.

The primary benefit of an extended outdoor journey is that it changes one’s basis of survival. The set of circumstances that provided me with food, shelter, and security changed drastically when I went backpacking or rock climbing. I think this change of perspective was important in that it allowed me to examine my prior circumstances from afar, without having my immediate survival at stake. This provided a clarity of vision that I haven’t found in other endeavors. It also made me cognizant of the fact that there are ways to survive other than those I know. This is incredibly encouraging.

Going a little deeper, I think immersion in the outdoors is beneficial because ultimately, our survival always depends on the natural systems we experience there. My attempts at school and work seemed almost designed to make me forget that the building blocks of my body and everything around it were at some point grown or dug from the earth. Somehow we must relate to the land to survive, but my cultural situation had taught me to relate to organizations, corporations, and various other constructions instead. It didn’t sink in that these entities must be conducting my relationship with the land for me until they were removed from the picture. Sleeping and walking on the earth for a long period of time helped to restore my sense of connection with it, and this in turn helped me to examine those organizations, corporations, and constructions more objectively. When I found things of value from this perspective, those values stuck with me instead of shifting and fluctuating like the Emperor’s clothes.

These are ways the outdoors helped me to find my values. They are part of the reason that one of those values is the outdoors, but that isn’t really my intended point. I think the outdoors can help people to discover their values, even if the outdoors itself doesn’t end up ranking high on the list. It helped me see the relationships and ideas that are most valuable to me in my indoor life, and I believe it can do the same for others. Just go on your own outdoor search for the Holy Grail. You may find you already have it, but it takes a step outdoors to see it in the light.

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