Close your eyes and imagine a serene environment. The icy Appalachians hide the rising golden sun in the distance, the foreground is occupied by the Dakotan badlands with bales of hay rolling across the wilderness in the wind, and everything in between the plains and the mountains have been taken up by corn farmers. There’s nothing out here for miles and miles, it’s just you and the road. A man and his ability to fend for himself.
Once you let the loneliness of not being around a town for the next two hundred miles sink in, you allow yourself to appreciate the overwhelmingly pristine natural environment, something away from what man has made. God created all of nature and has assigned man to rule over it, yet nature is so vast and enormous that man just seems so little. You are so in awe of what you see that you can only consider any alteration to the present state as a gross exploitation of resources.
When you are by yourself, you have the opportunity to become one with yourself. To understand that one of your heart’s deepest desires is to dig into your soul and ask yourself the most important questions. These may include wondering about what your very being is defined by. The ask but not to question, to affirm and not to cause trouble, to discover and not to change the fundamental person that you are.
We all have to be true to ourselves because nobody else can tell us who we are. If we aren’t honest about the things we want, then we are really only depriving ourselves of the truth. I’ve spent the last four years in university to find that many of my peers have ended up trying to be something they’re not. They are only fooling themselves.
In out first year everyone was trying to get to grips with the new mode of learning and our very selves remained the same. During our second and third years some of us formed cliques and others drifted apart. By our fourth year, most students were so absorbed by internships, placements, and further studies that their very behavior and appearance has changed beyond recognition. They have changed so much that if you haven’t met them since leaving high school you would’ve thought you were talking to a whole different person.
The person would dress fashionably, so they’d look no different to any other person walking down High Street. Their political and personal views would be so fluid that they no longer stood for anything anymore, their views would just be the product of influence from mass media. When they’d open their mouths and talk, they would be so preoccupied with making themselves agreeable to others that their words no longer held any substance. By the time they’d graduated with a degree, society’s expectations would be so deeply ingrained in their mental codex that any evidence of individuality and any ability to think critically about their surroundings would have been taken away from them.
The governing always wants the governed not to question the present way of conducting day-to-day life. It is for this very reason that we must question everything around us, not to be anarchists, but to constantly ask “why” and explore possible improvements on our present situation. The stagnant nature of our thinking and constraints on path dependency upon our current system paralyzes our ability to come up with novel ideas on ways of life. We mustn’t get used to how things are done, especially people that live in a developed city.
The plains of Montana, the hills of Washington, the fields of Minnesota, and the wilderness of Arizona – all scenes most of the nation are unfamiliar with. Yet all these great places rest in the same heartland that we claim as our home. The farther we venture from what we know, the closer we will be to our hearts. The longer we travel alone, depending on the kindness of strangers, the more we will be exposed to human motivations through those interactions. The higher we climb into unknown territory, the more we will discover about ourselves.
If your current situation puts your mind in a box and stifles your creativity, then leave the environment that you are accustomed to and experience another way of life. Be it in the hills, be it in the valleys, be it in the fields of this great nation, you are sure to discover something new to you. And in this discovery, you will realize that the life you have had is not the only life you can lead. And I implore you, as a friend and a fellow explorer to go out with an open mind to understand other peoples and to bring those ideas back home to improve the living experience of your fellow neighbors.
