There’s something about being outside that feels different than anywhere else.
Specifically, I don’t mean doing outside; I mean being outside.
The ability to just sit or ride or exist in the outdoors is a privilege I will always be grateful for. Because every time it happens, it’s like years are added onto my life. Like weight is released from my soul.
When I am in a people-centric place, a city or a highway or a mall, where people-ness rises up and severs my connection to the outdoors, I become agitated and anxious. There are too many sounds and smells and lights and color; noise and chaos and filth.
But when I am outside, despite the fact that there are MORE sounds and sights and smells and chaos, it feels soft. Comforting. As though I am in a place where I can truly feel safe.
People require a significant amount of mental and emotional energy from me. They are always there, potentially noticing or interacting, and I am always aware of their presence.
But in the forest, I am simply a part of it. I am no different than a bird or a bear or a badger. I can burrow or flit or growl, but the size of me is utterly subsumed by the essence of the forest. All of it is exponentially, maybe even infinitely bigger than me.
I am a blip and nothing more.
An inconsequential passerby in the life of a centuries-old tree, a forest of a millennia of years.
Because of this, i am safe to exist exactly as I am.
In the number of days, my life might be greater than that of a bird, an otter, or a bear, but my life is inconsequential compared to a tree. And nothing in relation to the days of a stone, or to the Earth itself.
When you take a step back and see the Earth floating in the cosmos, a pale blue dot as Carl Sagan described it, you see all of humanity as one. But when you step even further back, and see the passage of time—I am not even a thought, a memory, a mote.
I am nothing except myself.
And there is no lost honor or sadness in this. It is the way of all things. And it is the way of being alive in this universe, in this time.
I exist. As do the whales and the unfathomable expanse of the ocean and the moose being devoured by an orca on the shore.
We all exist for a blink in the lifespan of the universe. My life is naught but a grain of sand in the ocean. A single pebble in the Earth’s crust. A drop of water in a thunderstorm.
But without me, the universe would not be as it is.
