On Oct. 10, two of my friends asked if I wanted to go camping. Destination? Kings Canyon National Park, California. I thought about how I'd only ever been camping in a tent twice in my life and how much work needed to get done. But after 0.2 seconds of thinking, I agreed to go.
Mind you, I’m not one to make decisions impulsively. I’d like to think I “go with the flow,” but when I make important decisions, I have to ask five friends' opinions on what I should do. So an impulse decision left little room for expectations. That being said, I had my mind set on potential inspiration and epiphanies from 200-feet-tall sequoias and jagged mountain faces.
I thought I was going to learn how to slow down, but instead I learned to appreciate my own pace.
We go to nature to pause our lives because nature seems so still. But it's not. It just changes on a remarkably smaller scale compared to human lives. A 1700-year-old tree stood tall long before America was even an inkling. Even the mountains, which look immovable, shifted to get to where they are now.
We do not come upon a static image when we retreat to campgrounds.Campsites are placed within nature, so we are able to move along with it. Not without challenges, of course.
Challenge #1: My friends and I set up the tent, (OK, let’s be honest. They did it without me) and after hiking, we huddled inside it over a delicious, albeit cold, meal of pasta and guacamole. But because we hadn’t anticipated the rain, it ran right off the tarp, soaking into the tent. Emily (aka: my hero) braved the downpour to stake the tarp and divert the runoff.
Challenge #2: A week prior, I had tweaked an ankle muscle. Not pulled, because I could walk, but painful enough that I had to wrap it with athletic tape. That day I hiked seven miles. There is nothing quite like the reward of a vantage point. At the top of the falls, there were still mountains towering above us, and a city of trees beneath us.
Even at that rest point, everything was moving. Bird chirping and wood-pecking was constant. Trees swayed, and clouds breezed by. Even our relatively still bodies worked in harmony as we munched on carrots. Emily said, “I can’t believe this exists in the same planet that we do.”
And I can't either sometimes. Our human lives are moving at warp-speed, so we forget our place within the greater timeline. I freak out over arbitrary things like what outfit to wear, which plans to make, or even what jobs to apply to. Yes, those may all be important to me, but after I’ve lived my own lifetime, it will simply be one more circle in my tree ring.
In the morning, the scent of earth-soaked forest was the only trace it had rained the night before. We went for one last hike amongst the sequoias and said goodbye to a memory I know I will hold with me for a long time. I eagerly await my next camping trip and the lessons I will learn from it.
