On Life and Nature
Self-imposed isolation in these dreary times can be exhausting and frustrating, always surrounded by the same people in your household day after day in an otherwise relentless demand economy.
But it also opens a window of opportunities for self-exploration and discovery, as a novel and liberating way to reinvigorate one’s old life. This was harder to make time for earlier in the repetitive everyday cycle of work, Netflix, and sleep.
Over the course of recurrent quarantine ordinances from above, I’ve had more time than ever to try out new hobbies and interests: I’ve picked up yoga, German, solitaire, journaling, and sudoku, as well as some dormant hobbies, such as guitar playing, meditation, chess, and writing. I also go on walks on a regular basis now.
Apart from that, I’ve yearned for a return to nature for as long as I can remember. The prospect of longer walks, of hiking and trekking have haunted me as my unrelenting aspirations.
Many authors, composers, and other accomplished minds have championed walking as a pursuit worthwhile for the restless mind. It helps to get one’s creative juices flowing, to calm your nerves, and to appreciate beauty and solitude in all its majesty.
Kant went on walks daily with categorical regularity to quiet his mind from continuous reflection. Beethoven walked daily too, and used to jot down his musical ideas in a notebook that he brought with him everywhere he went. English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth went consistently on walks in the inspiring Lake District of Northern England. The Irish tradition of monastic wandering and orientation towards nature spread learning at a transnational level in Medieval Europe and fostered profound contemplation.
The reason I want to go on walks, on the other hand, is to reconnect and appreciate my being in a newfound manner. I long for its new experiences; it’s uncharted territory, and a mere intellectual map of it is the dearth and languishing of excessive conceptualization.
In primary and secondary school, I used to say that I rotted at home during the weekends as a way of describing my domestic indoors experience as if it were an enjoyable experience. Now I perceive that it impinged my sense of life by making it seem dull and uninteresting, which induced me to seek refuge in escapist comfort.
What I ultimately want to do is to saunter in nature on my own, in order to inspire my writing and to enliven my self. As a piercing catalyst for self-realization, the woods and the mountains will hopefully help me see what truly matters in life and writing, namely the sense of essentialist meaning and destiny as embedded in my concrete universal significance, i.e. my actual lived experience.
My constellation of thoughts and emotions have been erudite and learned thus far, but they ought to acquire a new dimension of vitality, as it were.
It’s as if I’ve recently become much more intensely addicted to life, which currently feels like a restless and delightful boon of exhilarating, vital force, a terribly underdeveloped instinct that most blunt-lived people miss out on. I can’t find words to describe it; it’s like a latent juggernaut of almighty Lebenskraft, an unparalleled propellant of immediate life force that you must ignite in yourself, an encouraging message which I stress from the bottom of my heart.
And that’s the truly life-embracing vision I need to take my life direction in, since competition is stupid whereas the creative process will nourish my epiphanic and spasmodic soul for the rest of my ticking time here on earth, in order to unleash the inherent energies of an as yet inactive élan vital.
Ignite it yourself.
