To Live

It’s funny how all my problems seem to melt away when I’m outside.

They don’t disappear and I don’t suddenly become unaware of them, but they lessen. The severity of things doesn’t seem so unbearable, the situations I’m in never seem as dire. Alone, staring at my phone in a house that blocks out all sound save for quiet electrical hums and the occasional beep from a source I can never identify, everything is overwhelming. All struggles seem hopeless, everything feels empty, I feel like I’m barely alive and like I need to be doing something more worthwhile with my time. But no matter what I do, no matter what I accomplish that day in big or small ways, it never feels like enough; it all feels like unsalvageable failure. I worry about stupid things, like what others think of me and the way that I look, far more than I should.

But when I step outside in the sun and the air, with the birds and crickets and every other creature chirping and calling, it’s like the overwhelmingly loud chatter in my head shuts down. I see tiny bugs fly by when the sunlight catches them just right, I smell the dirt beneath me and around me, I put my hands on the rough bark of trees and it catches on my palms, sticking to my skin. I duck underneath poison vines and grab onto saplings to pull myself up sharp slopes, I look at little rocks- insignificant, seemingly, in the grand scale of the world- and admire the ways they’ve broken, or the fossils they house, little lives that ended long before my own began. I see the tall grass, tufted and swirled from wind, I see the aspen leaves shaking and quaking a hundred feet above my head, look at their exposed clonal roots growing into more trees just as tall as their mother. I brush aside leaves on a wet forest floor and find caterpillars and pillbugs, I turn over rocks in the streams and find crawdads and teeny-tiny fish. I walk up a terribly steep hill and stop, every twenty or so feet, to catch my breath and rest my legs before I continue on up. My boots rub blisters into my ankles and my feet, and they hurt; the berry vines catch and scratch my legs even through my pants. Sometimes I’ll find a tick (not lately, for better or for worse) and have to pull it off me. I walk knowing there are creatures in the woods looking at me that I do not notice or see.

Through all of that my mind is quiet, focused only on what my eyes see in front of me. The fears I have fade, overwhelmed by the sounds and the smells and the taste of the air, distracted by how I have to narrow my eyes in the bright sunlight so that I can see, the sunlight that turns the plumes of seeds on top of tall stalks into glowing circles of fluff. I’m happy enough and content enough to see a little snake coiled up on the ground, looking at me, or to dodge a walnut that falls from a tree, or an acorn thrown at me by a squirrel. It’s all so real, so undeniably real, and I don’t feel as if I’m running out of time or somehow not good enough as a person when I’m in it. All that matters is what is, right then, right there.

I know some people would think the following claim I’m going to make the ramblings of a crazy person, but we are not meant to live in silence. We are not meant to spend our days and nights enclosed in blocks of concrete or drywall, cut off from every natural sound around us, hearing only the things powered by electricity and modern invention. Why is the sound of crackling wood in a fireplace so comforting? Why is it such a relief when spring comes and we open our windows, letting in the fresh air and the songs of peepers and migratory birds? Why do you feel so relaxed and simple when you do nothing more than sit outside and hear laughter from your neighbors yard? That is where and how we are supposed to live, surrounded by things like us, that we’ve evolved with, not inside where we’ve created a separation from all else that lives, opposed even to the thought of other small and harmless living things finding their ways inside with us.

I watch wasps zip around their nests and chew on pieces of fruit I’ve put nearby for them. I put my fingers in front of jumping spiders and see them turn to me, looking up with their many eyes at something a great deal larger than they are. I’ve picked enough tomato hornworms off of my plants to know that even they act different from each other, some feisty and others content to just wriggle around. Even just admiring these things brings a calm to my mind, but to live out there, surrounded by them, enforces it so clearly.

I like to smell like dirt and mud. I like to feel gritty, to have to scrub my skin violently to clean it, to feel the faintest sting of little scratches on my limbs. I like to have to pull sticks from my hair when they get caught from my ducking below the underbrush, I like all of these things even when they might be negative. When I look out to the horizon from the tallest hill I can find, I know that I’m not the first to see it, nor will I be the last. It’s a far cry from inside, staring at a computer backed by a plain wall that will likely not last much longer on this earth than I do.

Everything outside is more tangible and more real than anything that isn't. We have closed ourselves off from the things that we have always lived with, things that have existed for so long we know nearly nothing about them for certain. I don't know the people who lived, 2000 years ago, on this farm that I live on—not their names, nor their faces, nor their laughs and smiles and cries. But I do know, when I’m trudging over the hills, that I’ve walked the same paths and seen the same moon they did. When I look at that horizon, it’s the same one that they saw so many years ago, and every day they lived was once like this day, today, when I write or you read. It was today, right now, this moment, and none of us or the things we have now would exist until after every memory of them and their own lives were long forgotten.

But they were there, weren’t they? We know that. Every time I step outside I’m reminded of that, of the world that they saw, of the amount of time that has truly passed and how many wonderful lives have been lived and come to an end. The amount of love and grief, the jokes and languages, the songs and dances and poems and foods and life that have come before me and, just as well, surround me now and will follow after my end. It makes me wonder, of all the people who have lived on this earth before, how many I would have gotten along with. How many I would have liked and how many would have liked me; how many I resemble, in one way or another, and how many resembled my friends or my family; how many friends and loves never happened only because they lived at different times.

But I am not separate from those people who lived before. One day I’ll die and become part of them, of the past, of the history that someone else wonders about. My name may be forgotten as so many are, but I will have lived, breathed air both good and bad and listened to water trickling over rocks, seen mountains and the ocean and watched the clouds roll by in the sky. I will have loved, I will have grieved, eaten good food and some not so good, I will have lived in this world that we have always lived in. I like to think of that, rather than living inside my cardboard box, fearing that I haven’t amounted to anything or that I never will, feeling that I’m not good enough at this or that and that others know and judge me for it. Those people who lived before me didn’t live in high-rise cities or have fancy lives like I feel I need to achieve, lest I be a failure. But they lived, fully, and I don’t think any less of them for things they never did. It's not to say I won’t try to achieve the things I want, but what is the purpose in feeling so much worry over it? It will not help or solve my problems, only hinder and harm. I’d much rather think that living is enough, and everything else is secondary. People aren’t cogs in a machine—they are valuable, each and every one, for doing nothing more than living. They always have been, and they always will be. What a gift that is, to simply live, all the joy and pain that comes with it. Just to live.