I'm currently reading a book, Against Medical Advice. It's about a boy growing up with Tourette's and OCD; but that's not important. Something this kid said, for he is the narrator, bothered me. Well, let's put it this way, it didn't bother me, per se, so much as it sparked deep cogitation and thoughtful enterprise.
In chapter 54 or 56 or so, this kid is sent away to wilderness camp because he is a chain smoker and alcoholic.
As an aside, I don't care if my child is born with a foot up his ass and teeth coming out of his forehead; I would never let him smoke at 13 and start drinking at 15. Anyway...
At this camp, there are other troubled teens and, the way he describes it, a great number of them were problem children who had run afoul of the law. During his stay here, the kid describes how the wilderness camp was a very restorative journey that removed his need to both drink and smoke. He also described how other children were helped by it too.
Here's what bothers me, though, and is the kind of back-assward thinking I do on the daily. When I head into the wild for a weekend or a week, I experience the opposite of what I should. When I sleep on the hard, compact earth, when I'm only separated from elements and animals by a thin piece of nylon, when I'm eating food from a bag and what I can catch, I am more at peace, tranquil, and alive.
I've spent a week a Yosemite, suffering mosquitoes, bears, raccoons, and frigid temperatures, and yet, I think back on that experience fondly as I think of the most refreshing and complete sleep I've had in years. I awoke every morning as the sun broke over the mountains feeling refreshed and energetic. What the hell? I have a $500 technologically advanced mattress, climate control, and a bug free environment in which I sleep at home. So what gives?
Maybe we're not meant to live this way.
What if, and bare with me here, we are denying a fundamental need to our psyche to be at peace through which we receive from our connection to nature? We've spent so long fighting nature and perhaps nature is the key to our sanity. Ever noticed how people are becoming more impatient, ruder, angrier, grumpier, etc. Maybe it's because they are more and more separated from nature? Maybe it's because we share something with nature that we are denying ourselves with technology? Maybe our discontent is because we are trying to fill a nature hole with a technology peg.
