I admit, I may have misled some of you. To those who are excited to read about the psychedelic properties of some naturally grown fauna or lab-created chemicals, you are going to be sorely disappointed. I am, unfortunately, going to write about none of those things. Still, I hope you’ll stick around for the rest of the article. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe your life will be forever changed. At the very least, you’ll read something for once in your life and your God-forsaken, drug-addled brains will finally get some exercise. Damned hippies.

You may be surprised to learn I’ve never really liked being inside cities. You may also not be at all surprised by that, but that’s beside the point. I used to think it was just because of all the people, and that’s definitely part of it. I am the kind of person who enjoys having a fair amount of time to myself – time and space enough to ruminate in my own thoughts and indulge in some of my Netflix obsessions. That gets to be a little hard when there is an entire city’s population moving, yelling and living in every direction for miles and miles around. It gets a bit stifling, you know?

And then I came to the University of California, Santa Cruz: the campus on top of a hill. And my perspective changed. You see, I’m from a little place called Sacramento, comfortably nestled in the heart of California’s Central Valley. Sacramento is flat. Flatter than my very bony butt. Flatter than my singing. The first time I tried to ride my bike up a hill, I couldn’t understand what was happening, and I gave up within minutes. It just wasn’t something my hometown’s streets ever prepared me for. So, when I came to Santa Cruz, one of the biggest things I had to adjust to were the hills. Oh, these glorious hills. Nature’s bountiful booties, rising and falling, each more beautiful than the last. One of the cool things about hills, and especially about being on top of one, is you can see everything around you. And that was how I realized the reason why I don’t like being in big cities.

Now, good ol’ Sac Town is definitely a city, but it is nowhere near the scale of places like San Francisco or New York City. Those are great, big sprawling metropolises, long canyons of looming steel and glass, twisting lanes that join and break and go on forever and ever. Seeing a major city from above is like seeing an unfinished, metal jigsaw puzzle that people have been cobbling together and breaking apart for centuries. It’s a beautiful thing. The problem is that, most of the time, we experience a city from the ground rather than from above.

Being in the middle of something like a big city, a huge man-made construction that obscures everything around it through its sheer vastness, can be pretty all-consuming. I’ve realized that standing between two long rows of huge pillars that reduce the sky to one distant blue strip can make the world feel a lot smaller. It isn’t just the people who make me uncomfortable in big cities, it’s the city itself. They make me feel cut off from myself, from the world, for the simple reason that I can’t see anything beyond it.

And that, my dear friends, is why you should go out and get high. Go find a place where it’s high and clear, where you’re able to see for miles in at least one direction. Go and sit there every once in a while, and look at the world sprawled out beneath you. Look how tiny and thin everything is, the people, no bigger than ants and the trees, no larger than toothpicks.

But hey, don’t you go and start feeling all superior and stuff. The most important part of this exercise is to look down and remember that before you climbed that hill, you were just another one of those ants. And remember that tiny little tree is the same one that dwarfed you before and that glowing city is the same one that swallowed you.

I think there is a lot you can get out of going somewhere high once in a while. Or at least, I sure do. Seeing how small things are helps me remember how big the world really is. It makes me feel better to realize that I’m just a tiny dot, occupying a tiny patch of land, because it’s a reminder there is so much more to the world than my little town and my little problems. Up here, I have more room to think, more room to breathe, a whole horizon-full of space. Up here, I’m not limited to being part of one street, or one city.

So, go on, you crazy kids, go get high. Stop letting the streets you live on and the perspective you occupy limit you. Go look into the unceasing horizon, look at the curved edge of the world that just keeps going and going, and let that be your only boundary.