Over the weekend I went to a party at a cabin out in the middle of the woods. I went on a hike with a friend and he was a little concerned we would get lost and I then talked a bunch of big talk about how I grew up wandering around the woods and never got lost, you don’t have to worry with me blah blah blah. Then we went out walking and started enjoying it and I guess we walked a lot farther than we realized and sure as shit, I totally forgot to mark the location of the house on the map, then on the way back, I became convinced that we had gone too far and took us off the path, wound up trudging through a swamp, finding a river–river? Where the hell did this river come from?
Granted, we were never in any real danger. I had my phone and while we did not have service, GPS still worked, but there was a good 20 minutes of trudging through the woods, trying to piece together where the hell we were, worried that we had somehow completely turned ourselves around and were walking the wrong direction.
But still, through the whole thing, we were just having fun with it. Then afterward we both felt like we were glad it happened, like, you don’t do that deliberately obviously, but when stuff like that happens, if you have the right attitude about it, you just find that it helps you reconnect with nature or helps hone your problem solving skills or whatever. That’s what life is for, is stuff like this.
I have known a lot of people over the years, including myself, who would have gotten all angry in a situation like this, like the fear hits us so hard that you then can’t pull yourself out of it, even though there was never any notable danger of injury, just a danger of having a much much longer hike than you anticipated.
I can remember so many times in my past where something went wrong, I did something stupid, then it just ruined my night, when I was overcome with embarrassment or a sense of “that shouldn’t have happened” or “I didn’t get the experience I was promised”. I think a lot of people have figured out how to escape that and find these healthy perspectives and a lot of people really have not. And those two types of people frequently really don’t understand each other.
So when I have these kinds of experiences, I try to think about them and analyze them about how it went right. It’s like your perspective is more important than the actual facts, like yes, next time I’m out in the woods, I’m going to open up Alltrails and just start tracking my hike so I know exactly where we have been. Easy solution right there. I had even pulled the app up to see if it showed any trails in the area, but we were too remote even for Alltrails and I just for some reason didn’t bother hitting the button to track our hike. So silly.
Plus I think we were maybe trespassing. The airbnb said there were hiking trails around so we didn’t know for sure.
So this reminded me of a time when I was a teenager when me and three of my friends drove down to Mount Saint Helens, a volcano a few hours south of Seattle Washington. We wound up pulling over to a viewing site on the side of the road at nearly midnight. We had a bottle rocket fight, basically just shooting bottle rockets at each other for half an hour or so, then we tried to sleep in the van, but none of us could sleep so we finally decided to just get back up and drive on. We soon found ourselves, after 1AM, at the Ape Caves, old tubes formed by lava in the previous eruption like a million years ago or something.
There was no security. The caves were closed to the public after hours of course, but we just walked in anyway. So we are alone exploring this cave in the middle of the night. Granted, I had been through this cave a number of times before with my dad.
We only had two flashlights. One friend with a light, he thought it would be fun to just race ahead and leave the other three of us. So then we had to share one flashlight between three of us until halfway through, the batteries run out and it goes completely pitch black.
But again, it wasn’t anything that anyone got upset about, even for a moment. It was just funny, an adventure. We hadn’t planned for this and if we’d known the batteries were running out, of course we would have been smarter about it, but since it happened, if you’re in a healthy mindset, you have fun with it and you adventure your way out.
And that’s what we did, we just felt our way out of the cave. So Google says the upper part is 1.5 miles, so that means we had to feel blindly our way through about three quarters of a mile of cave. The upper portion is more difficult than the lower. There’s scrambling over rock piles and stuff and a point where you have to “scale an 8 foot rock wall”–I don’t remember it being that tall when I was a kid but I do remember that wall in the pitch black. It took a bit of teamwork and communication to get past it.
But none of us would ever say “that experience sucked” or “I wish that never happened”. Quite the opposite. This is a joyful memory for all of us.
So how do we take that perspective and apply it to other things in life when they go wrong? I feel like I’m getting better at finding that perspective in more and more areas of my life, particularly social things, like when people get in arguments, I used to be so terrified of conflict and now when I am forced to interact with someone I see as toxic, I practice, and I try to get excited, “it’s gonna be fun to practice my de-escalation techniques” kind of an attitude, make a game out of handling difficult situations, knowing you’re gonna make mistakes and that those mistakes can often bring the best learning and the funniest stories.
So I try to experiment as much as possible with perspectives like this, trying to steer my mind back to this idea that this is all a game, this is all just for fun at the end of the day. That’s the whole reason why we’re here, is to have fun, and yes we still need to be responsible and reasonable, make smart choices, but the reason we want to make smart choices is so that we can have more fun at life in the long run and so that we can help the people around us to have more fun in the long run.
I need to remember this when I’m driving. I think that’s where I struggle the most to find this perspective is when I’m behind the wheel of a car. I just hate it so much and I can’t get out of that perspective. It’s not just the dangerous stuff that upsets me, it’s also the people going slow, or traffic jams, it’s like everything about driving just offends me and I don’t know why I struggle with it so much when everything else in my life is so blissful to me.
A few weeks ago I rode the T home from a night doing mini-putt and I got caught in the pouring rain, had to walk half an hour to get downtown to the station (though to be fair, someone really cool wanted to walk with me and she was real interesting to talk to) I had to transfer to the silver line, then walk another 20 minutes through the rain, and it never bothered–well, okay it bothered me a little, but I just thought about this perspective and I didn’t have much trouble just shifting back to appreciation for how I’m out getting exercise and have the chance to listen to my books.
But when I’m in a car, if someone tailgates me for a minute I’m like traumatized, I can’t get it out of my mind for hours, and occasionally it can ruin my whole night. If there’s a minute or two slowdown I’m all pissed and yelling and swearing.
What is it about cars that keeps me away from the mindset that I really want?
Okay, where am I going with this? I did not intend to ramble about cars. I wanted to come up with some ideas for how to find the fun adventure spirit when dealing with normally — that’s what it is about cars–it’s the fact that there is a real tangible danger–like doing driving incorrectly and you could die a horrible death. Make some mistakes and get lost in the woods, worse case scenario you have to walk a long long time or knock on a stranger’s door and have a real awkward conversation. I mean, I guess not everyone sees it like that, some people are way more scared of the woods than I am.
I feel myself wandering way off course here.
I think what’s most important is knowing and understanding as much as you can about your own responses to stimuli and experimenting with training yourself to think and feel in ways that are healthier and more supportive of your long-term mental health.