Being Inside While You’re Outside

By The Insider, 8-04-09

We’re outside folk, we Missoulians. Our garages and closets are full of boots and backpacks, coats and kayaks—the accoutrements of activity. If you happen to be in town on a long weekend, you’ll notice an almost ghostly quality to the empty silence created by our exodus to the wilds. This interest of ours (some might call it an obsession) spans generations and demographics. Some can climb into their Escalades, load up their trailers with jet-skis or boats and head to their lake house. Others, well…got five bucks? Spend it on gas for your beat-up Subaru and find your way to a hundred great hiking trails. Don’t have a car? Take a bike ride. Don’t have a bike? Walk to Freecycle! You get the idea.

There’s nothing wrong with this outdoor obsession of ours, but a preoccupation with Montana’s landscape often leaves the inner landscape unexplored. Constant doing is sometimes a substitute for –- or an escape from -– simply being. It isn’t just outdoor activity that can sweep us away from reality, it’s activity itself. Think about it, when was the last time you did nothing? Somebody calls and says, “What are you doing?” “Nothing,” we say—but we’re lying! We don’t stop.

If we’re not working, we’re watching TV, listening to our iPod, talking (or texting) on the phone, running errands, heading to the lake, making dinner, cleaning up after dinner, renting a video, watching a video, calling a friend to see if he wants to watch a video, updating our status on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace so that everyone will know what we’re doing. It’s literally endless. A teacher of mine recently said that we shouldn’t be called “human beings,” we should be called “human-doings.”

Here’s my question: what if we just stopped? Stopped distracting ourselves and just sat with the silence. Stopped our endless and often frenzied activity and took more time to just…well, to just be.

Nature can be healing, soothing, re-creative. Being in the wilderness can actually create the conditions needed to quiet the cacophony of a modern world and allow us to take a look inside. The problem is that no matter how far into the wilds we go, we always take ourselves with us. This blog is not about the wilderness “out there,” it’s about the one that’s “in here.” The unexplored wilderness of the heart, the mind, the soul. It’s a landscape worth exploring, I think, and in this blog we’ll do it together.