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I’d once heard that we are nothing but our stories. Forget the blood and bones and genes and cells. They’re not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative. We are the events and people and places to which we’ve assigned symbolic meaning.
Thoreau saw the world in the veins of a maple leaf, and Muir, it seemed, could find God in a mouse turd. Nature, to them, was transcendence, beauty, divinity. To me, nature was more like a football field or hockey rink in which games are won and lost.
When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories.
Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain.
We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us.
Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?
Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How can we dedicate our lives to such things when we can see the impermanence of everything above and below us, in the flicker of a dying star or the decay of a rotting log?
Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation. When you see the aurora, the only logical choice you can make is to spend the rest of your life seeking the sublime.
Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us. When we do that, we don’t have to bear the responsibility of our unhappiness or shoulder the burden of self-ownership. We don’t have to do anything. And nothing will ever change.
Even though I had liked to think I was a solo adventurer, I realized that I was never really alone. I walked a tightwire above a net of compassion, stretched out by the hands of strangers.
When we are raised by institutions, we are fashioned, in ways big and small, to be like everyone else. But when we go on a journey—especially a journey that follows no one else’s footsteps—it has the capacity to help a person become something unique, an individual.
Today, however, it seems like the whole “coming of age” adventure has been abridged from a young person’s life experience, leaving no gap, no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career.
Nature, I realized, is only beautiful when you’re at a safe distance from
After more than forty days on the voyage, I no longer saw nature and myself as independent entities; rather, I was nature, living among the roots, insects, animals, and storms. Because nature was indifferent to me, I began to feel indifferent to it.
The voyage was teaching me how unexceptional I was and how exceptional the human mind and body is.
Our real limits are beyond the scope of our vision, beyond the horizon, a boundary worthy of our exploration.
The twenty-first-century adventurer—because he has no frontiers to settle or wild lands to explore (nor the technology to push the boundaries of outer space)—has to sort of make it up.
In suburbia, except for when we conjure the willpower to go for a walk around the neighborhood, there’s hardly any real purpose in going outdoors.
we need need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. We need to be forced to sacrifice, to grow a garden, to fix a roof, to interact with neighbors.
the joy of all joys, the epitome of human existence.
there is no demographic that has a sharper instinct for empathy than the downtrodden.
walking through the ruins of the many people I’d met, I saw that flowers still bloomed, lives still went on, the earth rehabilitated, and people reformed.
when work is meaningful and when the worker provides some useful service or produces some useful product, work is no longer “work” but an enriching component of one’s day.
It is a borderless, boundaryless country, an expanding universe whose farthest reaches are always beyond the grasp of your imagination.
the forests, mountains, jungles, and prairies will assume grander forms if we give the romantic hand of imagination a chance to color in the blank spots of the map—as it is wont to do—with deeper caves, larger peaks, and secret mountain lakes.
The quicker we Google Map the earth, the more we restrict our native planet from evoking feelings of wonder and enchantment and love for it within the hearts of its human inhabitants. Earth should always remain partly unknown, partly undiscovered, partly unclassified.
we are enchanted most by the places we can never go.
a beauty that repulsed as much as it allured.
the terrifying grandeur of an endless wilderness invited us to embrace the wild and unruly sensations of the uncertain now.
Saint Francis of Assisi
As a country, we marched from one unpaid-for purchase to the next in a quest for fulfillment that fades long before the bill arrives.
If freedom was our fear, debt was our gravity.
Debt narrows our options. It gives us a good reason to stick it out at a job, sink into sofas, and savor the comforts of the status quo.
Sometimes it’s not until you see your shackles that you see your dreams. The soul must first be caged before it can be set free.
freedom was simply being able to entertain the prospect of changing your circumstances.
I am a member of the “career-less generation.” Or the “screwed generation.” Unlike previous generations, the members of my generation won’t get jobs and respectable wages straight out of high school, let alone college. We don’t have the means to buy homes and start families in our twenties. We’re the first generation in a while who will be less well off and less secure than their parents’.
For some, it’s hard to think that the direction of success is anywhere but up the socioeconomic ladder, especially when success is largely measured by security, comfort, and wealth. But maybe progress can point in funny directions. Must we measure our success by the size of our homes and salaries? What if we got healthier, lived more sustainably, and became more self-reliant, albeit in tighter dwellings and in smaller families? Isn’t that success, too?
When we accept a gift, I thought, sometimes we don’t just acquire a debt but an identity.
I thought that if I accepted money from the government or a friend or a family member, I’d be permitting someone to draw the edges of my identity,
Real poverty is not being able to change your circumstances.
the liberal arts have the capacity to turn on a certain part of the brain that would otherwise remain shut off—the part of our brain that makes us ask ourselves questions like: Who am I? What’s worth fighting for? Who’s lying to us? What’s my purpose? What’s the point of it all?
Desmond Bagley said: “If a man is a fool, you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.”
The university today is not a place where we go to question the dominant institutions; it is a place where we learn to support them.
Discomforts are only discomforting when they’re an unexpected inconvenience, an unusual annoyance, an unplanned-for irritant. Discomforts are only discomforting when we aren’t used to them.
We need so little to be happy. Happiness does not come from things. Happiness comes from living a full and exciting life.
solitude gave me something I never would have expected: a culture of my own.
Envy is a bitter fruit, but one that only grows when we water it with the nourishment of society.
society’s definitions of poverty and wealth: To be poor is to have less and to be rich is to have more. Under these definitions, we are always poor, always covetous, always dissatisfied, no matter the size of our salary, or how comfortable we are, or if our needs are in fact fulfilled.
The wild green eye of nature is always spying, always staring, always watching, ready to lock on to yours when you’re ready for it. Look into it closely and in the eye’s reflection you might catch a glimpse of the objective you: that cultured creature of softness and sophistication or, if you’ve done well to fall far enough from civilization’s grace, the very brute, beastly nature of the wild eye itself.
Yet, after enough time in the wild, I’d feel, if just for a moment, the place begin to overtake me, like vines crawling up the walls of deserted buildings, weeds burgeoning in concrete cracks, whole forests reclaiming the ground that had been seized from them.
