Hiking is movement.
We choose a location and decide to travel through it. Sometimes hiking is walking in a complete
circle. How could that be fun?
In our daily lives, we have to move to interact, whether in
work or play. So work is movement, and
having fun is movement. Eating food with
a friend requires we chew, pick up the fork, and drink the sweet tea.
So why would we choose to hike, to move through the woods,
through a park, or through any location?
Movement is so essential to every moment that, even if we’re standing
completely still, the internal workings of our body are constantly in
motion. We don’t explain to our mother,
“I’m sorry Mom, I can’t help you move those file folders, I have to practice my
digestion right now.”
But why hike? Why
would we choose movement for the sake of movement?
When hiking, maybe we have an end goal in mind: to reach the
top of the cliff, to grasp the end of the trail, or to return to our car. And in that sense, hiking seemingly becomes
similar to other activities with a beginning and an ending. I pick up the toothbrush, I brush my teeth, I
rinse the toothbrush. Done.
Even so, hiking constantly undermines agenda. Better yet, it reveals our agendas.
If we err on the side of striving and reaching specific
goals, we might quickly come into contact with the driving desire to finish the
hike. Go, go, go! And much like the tunnel vision-nature of
achieving goals, while constantly pushing forward, we miss the entire
experience of the hike. Afterward, there
might be the vague sense that even though we walked a trail, we were never
there.
If we struggle with motivation, we might constantly be
focused on the physical discomfort of a hike, especially a strenuous one. Much like the goal-driven hiker, the
soundtrack of our pain might overwhelm any sound of birds or wind. Again, our own internal dialogue interrupts
our lives: “Ouch, ouch, ouch.”
A person constantly grasping for dramatic, peak experiences
might find a hike dull. In a place thick
with life on top of life, this person might ask, “Where is all the action?” or,
“There is nothing going on here.” Like a
moth moving toward a light bulb, this person hungrily grasps for validation,
hoping that finishing the hike will bring some lasting sense of happiness. By the end of the walk, rather than feel
disappointment for this unfulfilled desire, this person is already running for
the next shiny light bulb.
Hiking reflects our ways of dealing with the world. If we push for a hike to give happiness,
we’ll probably be disappointed. It’ll be
the movie not quite funny enough, the zip line adventure that was kind of
boring, or the cheese cake not as delicious as we remembered.
We could watch a hike.
We could watch ourselves, our methods, our trips, our internal
conversations. And we could keep
stepping, constantly seeing both the story inside and the actual world
outside. We could feel the 63 degree
wind while we feel the tough day that a coworker was rude to us. We neither push the experience away nor allow
that difficult Wednesday morning to remove us from the soreness in our calves
or the earth on our knuckles.
We hike as we live. And
while moving, we might see all things done and undone, all goals reached and
failed, all our kindnesses and our cruelties, the plethora of human storylines
forever spinning in our minds.
And we might also see that beyond these rich novels we
write, there exists the smell of dirt, the feeling of rain, and the air we
breathe with each step we take.
Alive.
