I don't know why, but it feels like ages since I last wrote my post! I missed yesterday (and the 15th) because I spent most of the day driving back from our camping trip. Maybe skipping those two days threw my schedule up in the air? Today I haven't been thinking about the day's post as much as usual, which seems to support that hypothesis. Maybe. Or maybe I've just been busy doing other stuff.

... Anyway ...

I didn't manage to convince myself to write earlier, so now it's 21:35 as I write this, and my mind is quite fuzzy. I'll try to get this done before things start getting "weird". Or maybe they're already weird. Yeah, I think it's too late, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this.

For some reason I keep thinking of the drive I did, when I was studying abroad, to get from the center of town to my apartment. I'm sure there's some important symbolism there, but it escapes me at this moment.

(The road takes me home, I'm driving up a hill, it's dark and... is it snowing? Or starting to snow. Nighttime. I'm probably coming back from the bar where I had a few drinks with my wife. She's in the car, I think.)

Well, I guess things are going to spiral out of control unless I set a direction for the post.

...

I've been thinking of doing a sort of "retrospective" (I think software engineering broke me) of our camping trip.

Overall, I have to admit it was a positive experience for me. The two things that I worried about the most (social interactions and physical discomfort) were not really as bad as I imagined.

The social part was actually really nice because (as I wrote in the previous post) the dynamics were completely different from what I'm used to. When I see my wife's family, it's usually in a "party" setting where there's not much to do except talk to each other (and play bingo). In a party, you're forced to interact with one another, and there's little escape without your absence being noted. But in camping, everyone is doing their own thing, and there's no expectation of anything. I like that. I like the extra freedom, and I feel it makes for more natural interactions.

Regarding "discomfort", I didn't have any! Well, maybe that's not correct; I was plenty uncomfortable at some points, but it wasn't a "bad" discomfort. I know that sounds pointless, so let me clarify.

I get the impression that at home (or in a place where you have some control), there's always the possibility to alleviate your discomfort in some way or another. I know I spend a good chunk of my day dealing with micro-discomforts that pop up all the time, and I don't realize it, but doing this takes energy away from other stuff.

But "out there" there's not much you can do, so the tables flip, and instead of discomfort being something that pushes you to "deal with it", it becomes "a thing", a part of the landscape. I often found myself feeling clammy and wet, or my feet hurting, but it didn't really bother me. It was just part of the "experience". Like color on a canvas.

(Of course, we only camped for two days. I don't know how I would feel after a longer camping trip. Still, this is my opinion given my extremely limited experience.)

There were also some other pleasant surprises.

First and foremost for me was how nice it felt to be more in line with the rhythms of nature. We woke up when it became light and went to bed shortly after dark. We respected the rains and the river. It felt a bit as if we were part of a dance rather than our own separate entities. I feel our homes and artificial lights act as a sort of illusory barrier between what we think is "our world" and "the world of nature". But in reality it's one and the same. Being out there makes this point much clearer.

Another thing I enjoyed is that there's always something to do, while at the same time there's no expectation for you to do more than your fair share. Be it helping somebody set up their tent or fix their tarp, or maybe just fiddling with your own stuff to make it better. I'm an engineer through and through, and I spent much of the first day tweaking our tarp to make sure water flowed without stagnating while at the same time avoiding contact between it and our tent (it was quite warm). There's also the fact that I was learning on the go, which is especially fun (for me). A side benefit of this is that I could go and offer to help (which was always well received), and that would count as an easy "social interaction".

Of course, there was also the freedom from "the screen". I only used my phone more or less once a day when, before bed, I wrote the post for the day. Not having my phone with me, not looking at the screen, made me feel so much lighter. It was like taking a vacation for my mind. Though it seems it's a hard habit to leave behind, as now that we're back I'm just as stuck to my screen as ever. Still, the experience did make me re-evaluate my relationship to my phone and the things I do therein, and I'm questioning their validity when compared to (waves hands) everything else.

...

Something I've been reflecting on ever since we came back is how discomfort helps you realize what sort of limits you're placing on yourself. In "normal life" I often don't do things because I think they will be uncomfortable, but that's also because (as I said above) I have the option to NOT do them. However, when you're faced with something that you really have no power over, then you just "accept it" and realize you can easily live with it in most cases. You realize it wasn't even a little bit as bad as you expected, and you were really just keeping yourself back from wonderful experiences.

Hopefully this is one of many such camping experiences :) Though for the next one I would hope for something a bit less "crowded".

Thoughts

  • I wonder what's happening with Azure and why they're taking so long to tell me whether they're going to reactivate my account or not. For the first few days, they were really good at giving me an update of the status, but now it's already been a few days without any news from them. Still, fingers crossed.
  • I realized I have an intuition that there are people who actually read these posts, and this immediately seems like a "vain" feeling. Probably the negative association comes from my "inner critic" / "impostor syndrome".
    • Crazy how one suffers from impostor syndrome. As I write this, an interesting thought arose: "What if the impostor syndrome is real and you really suck, is it really impostor syndrome in that case". Ha! That's double impostor syndrome!
    • But seriously. Is it?