TRANSCRIPT
Yesterday, I had the good fortune to be able to hike a few miles on the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. It was the first time I’ve ever been on the Appalachian Trail, and it was absolutely gorgeous. I was all alone out on this trail in the late afternoon. I didn’t see another soul. There were occasional squirrels and birds, wild mushrooms growing everywhere, and I just loved it. I loved the quiet and the peace and the isolation from humanity.
I walked along this trail, up through the mountains, down the mountains, back up to the high ridges where I could see over the Berkshires. As I was walking, I was thinking about life in a way, kind of being a trail forward, a path forward through existence. And then there was also a part of me that wanted to leave the trail, that just wanted to walk off into the forest and explore life with no trail to follow, my own path, not someone else’s predetermined path.
Then I thought of the number of people that don’t even go into the forest at all on a trail. They just stay put in civilization, away from the wilderness, away from everything, away from isolation and solitude. I was thinking of all of this as a metaphor for life. To me, the purpose of life is to grow, to evolve. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said in his poem “A Psalm of Life,” not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end or way, but to act that each tomorrow finds us further than today. To me, that’s a philosophy that I just love.
What I see in life so often is everybody starts on some sort of path, whether they’re on a trail or whether they’re off the trail, and they’re moving forward on their path. That is the passion of babies. That is the passion of children—to grow, to fight for themselves, to be themselves, to express themselves, to learn, to learn rapidly, to absorb information, to absorb whole languages, the fundamentals of languages, multiple languages sometimes very, very quickly. To learn about personalities and people and nature in the world, to learn about games and toys, to learn about religion even when their parents teach them that, or to learn about philosophies of life, to learn about life and death, to learn about their feelings.
But what happens so often to children is they get blocked, stunted, traumatized, and shut down. Sometimes so much so that they really, in whole parts of their personality, stop growing. I think of my parents in this way, how stunted they were. My dad, in so many ways, stunted to the age of five or six, and whole fundamental parts of his personality. People losing their empathy with other people, people wanting to act out their rage of what they went through because they can’t continue to grow. They can’t continue to move forward with life. Some people really getting stuck in perennial sorrow to the point that they can become self-pitying victims of life. Or to the opposite degree, like Wadsworth Longfellow talked about, people who just live for enjoyment, just live for pleasure, living for feeling good here and now, no thought of other people, no thought about growing, just pleasure, pleasure, hedonism even.
Well, what I see so often when I look at adults is they’re not really even on a trail of life so much anymore. If life is a trail going forward, they get off the trail not to go off trail and explore the real wilderness, but instead to just camp out, to wait, perhaps to wait for nothing. If they’re driving along the highway of life, they exit the highway of life and they stay at the rest area. They don’t drive forward anymore. They don’t move forward. So often, people find a comfort zone and they stay in that comfort zone. You could say they build boundaries around that comfort zone, but I think it’s much more extreme. They build walls around this comfort zone. They don’t want anything to pierce this comfort zone to make them feel uncomfortable or lack of enjoyment, and they don’t want to leave this comfort zone.
Even during this pandemic, this world crisis of craziness and insanity where the world is so turned upside down, I’ve met quite a lot of people who actually like many aspects of the pandemic. I know many people who finally, they don’t have to go to work anymore. They can just work at home. They can stay even more in their comfort zone. They don’t have to deal with their annoying bosses face to face. They don’t have to deal with an annoying commute. They don’t have to deal with difficult co-workers who perhaps confront them, perhaps confront them even in healthy ways. They can just live more in their bubble of existence.
I see so many people who actually really love, on fundamental levels and on metaphorical levels, to live in a bubble of their existence, a bubble of comfort. They get their food and their meals delivered to them. They live their life through the computer. They have their friendships through the computer. They have their romances sometimes even solely through the computer. They have their entertainment through the computer with Netflix and video games. In a way, they’ve kind of become like cyborgs. Many people have just lost their connection so profoundly in so many different ways with humanity, much less their connection with nature.
I know so many people who are terrified of nature. Even where I am in upstate New York, they’re like, “Be very careful when you go outside. There’s Lyme disease everywhere. It’s dangerous.” And now, to be honest, I go around and I see a lot of poison ivy also. Well, that’s another reason people don’t want poison ivy. And yeah, there are a couple of species of poisonous snakes out here. You’ve got to be careful. And at night, I hear coyotes. I know there’s coyotes probably within one mile of me right now. They’re harmless. They’re not going to do anything to me. Yeah, if I had a cat or a dog and I left them out at night, they might be at some risk. But I know people, “Oh no, I’m not going outside at night. It is too dangerous.” And there’s mice out here, and there’s skunks, and maybe they have rabies. I know so many people who are just scared, or even if they’re not scared of something so clear, they’re just scared of the unknown.
So I think of myself hiking on the Appalachian Trail yesterday and realizing, you know, I want to go the opposite of a rest area, the opposite of a comfort bubble. I feel like really doing some real bushwhacking and getting off the trail. So I left the trail and I walked about a mile through the forest with no trail at all. To be honest, it was a little scary at points. There were points where I was walking along and suddenly I’m like, “Oh, oh, there is a 40-foot drop, and I’m gonna have to climb down.” And it’s so covered with leaves, I can’t even see what I’m grabbing onto. And there’s big rocks sometimes that are kind of loose. At one point, one even fell, and I had to hold vines on the way down and make sure they were alive. I had to use my brains and also my strength. It’s not too often in my life, at my age, nearly 50, that I’m actually doing real climbing.
I looked at my cell phone and there was no reception. There were no bars on my cell phone. It was like, “Uh oh, something bad happens to me, nobody’s gonna find me.” And that’s a no-no. And I’m not carrying a compass, and I’m just wearing a pair of shorts, and I have just a tiny little thing of water that’s already half drunk. “No, no, bad Daniel, don’t do this.” All the world says, “Bad, evil, stupid. If you’re gonna win the Darwin award.” But then I think, you know, I can combat that. I’ve done that a lot. I was thinking, actually, what was it just a year ago, year and a half ago? I was in the mountains of northern India in the Himalayas, way out in the middle of nowhere, and I was hiking alone there. And it wasn’t 40 feet; I was going up and down. Sometimes it was 200 feet, and sometimes it was absolutely terrifying. And I was using the same principles: go slow, every step, think, use your brain. And what I found is that I was so incredibly present, and sometimes I was really scared. And then I realized, and it’s a great lesson for life.
Me sometimes out in the world to be scared and to realize, Daniel, if you keep being scared, this is going to kill you. I think that can be true with this pandemic. Sometimes I’ve seen people so overcome with fear about what might happen to them that their immune system goes down. They become actually more susceptible to getting sick, or if they do get sick, it’s going to be even worse, and they’re in such a state of panic.
Well, I’ve noticed sometimes being way off the trail in life, really being in a place where maybe no person has ever been before, I become very centered. I can’t allow myself to become overcome with fear. I actually have to have courage. I have to dig into my inner reserves of strength. Not that I’m advising people to go out and put themselves at risk and win the Darwin award, but for me, especially in my relationship with myself, I have a long history of being out in nature, pushing my limits, but at the same time knowing what my limits are.
You know, when I was up in the Himalayas, there was a guy who died a couple of days before I was doing some of my massive climbs out there, or walking across glaciers in the ice with a little puppy dog that I found who would follow me places where people weren’t supposed to go because it was too dangerous. But I realized, you know, if you use smarts and if you have a stick, you’re not going to fall in a crevasse. And I’m not actually local people who are doing it. They even explained to me sometimes just by non-verbally because we didn’t speak the same language. Yeah, it’s okay to do it, just be smart and know what you’re getting into.
So for me, especially if I’m really off the grid and off the trail, to be careful, to experiment, to learn what my limits are, to listen to people who know better than me. And so to get back to the metaphor, the internal emotional metaphor of growing, of becoming a real individual, of getting off the beaten track of life, to get off the Appalachian Trail of what is supposed to be the path forward, the sanctioned path of normalcy, it is dangerous. It can be scary. It can be lonely. It can be isolating. Sometimes there are no role models.
But it’s like to do this, we really need to be centered. We really have to know our limits. We have to know ourselves. We have to love ourselves. We have to respect and honor ourselves. We can’t just sometimes rush forward, haywire, willy-nilly into, well, the unknown. I think sometimes we have to test the water slowly. Yes, it’s about taking risks, but taking intelligent risks.
I’ve seen people who, in their healing process, don’t really know themselves that well, don’t trust themselves that well, and just close their eyes, hold their breath, pinch their nose, and jump forward. And sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes traumas come up too fast. Sometimes people run out of money. Sometimes people become homeless, isolated, lose relationships on which they are depending, relationships which maybe weren’t the best, but they still had some really good qualities.
So for me, what I see is basically in my life, largely, I have left behind the normalcy of what it means to be a regular person. And this exploration has been so valuable. It’s been so profound. It’s been such an opportunity for me to learn more about myself, to really grow, to see my flaws, to see my limitations. And if I had stayed within my comfort zone, within the bubble that my parents put me in, forced me in, my parents created my boundaries. They built walls around whole sides of my personality that they didn’t like, really healthy sides.
And for me, a lot of that was breaking down those walls, exploring what it is to be outside the walls of the city of convention. And for me, that has been so valuable in my life.
So as I was walking off the Appalachian Trail, way out in the middle of nowhere, in a direction that I knew because I could see where the sun was slowly setting, and I was heading in a different direction that I knew there was a road. So I knew, yeah, maybe I’ll end up at a river. I don’t know how I’ll cross it, but I’ll figure that out. I will cross that bridge when I get to it.
And I was able to make it through all these different valleys, and I had to climb up and down and up and down and bend myself down on some trees to bounce down. And eventually, I got cell service back again, and eventually I thought, oh, I’m gonna make it. I’m not gonna die, even though the part of me that thought I might die was pretty small. But I acknowledged there was a possibility.
And I think we so often live in a world where people are told never do that, never put yourself at risk, as if somehow people live in a fantasy that they will never die. And I think that is a fantasy of this first world society, that somehow we will live forever and that nothing will take us out, and anything that might kill us is evil or bad, and that death is bad, as opposed to death being a real part of life.
And death for me is a reminder that here I am now, and that I, to the best of my ability, want to grow and live out of my comfort zone such that I can make the most of this grand and profound existence that I have the good fortune to have right now.