simple zack

Be still and nature will reveal itself

There’s an unfortunate tendency to go at outdoor experience as if it were work - in a group-pressurized, accomplishment-driven, goal-oriented spirit that’s more like the executive suite than vacation.  “Been there, done that,” is a laugh line because it’s so sadly apt.  Way too much is done because we feel driven to do it - and we want to be sure others know we’ve done it - and all this doing gets in the way of simply being there.

The world has enough pictures of vibrant-colored trigger fish.  What it lacks is scuba divers who pass on taking the picture and, instead, hold still for as long as they can, wondering at the balletic bustle of a living reef.  What’s true in the ocean is true in jungles, deserts, on mountain tops and the Antarctic ice.  Great things happen when adventure travelers sit still, set aside everything that gets between them and their surroundings, and pay attention.  First, the life around you reemerges, because it forgets you’re there.  But the greater rewards are internal.  Stop and focus on the here-and-now long enough, and you forget the day’s itinerary, the people you’re with, what you’re going to tell and show the folks back home, and all the pressures and distractions of today’s adventuring.  At the same time, you begin to appreciate, in a deep way, where you are.

Collectors of Experience

Adventure travelers are particularly susceptible to “been there, done that,” because their trips are defined by attainments.  Climb this mountain.  Run that Class V rapids.  Meet that isolated forest tribe…  Attainments, kept in perspective, are fine.  Yes, set goals, realize long-held dreams, accept challenges, surprise yourself with what you can do.  These are adventuring’s glories, which conventional travel can’t begin to provide.  But keeping perspective can be difficult, especially in the company of a dozen or so hard-changing fellow adventurers, with guides doing everything possible to fill the days so the group gets its money’s worth.  The quickest escape from “been there, done that” is to take a break.  Forget the itinerary, get away from the group, then stop and just take it all in.  The break needn’t be long to work wonders.  A half-day of contemplative solitude can provide a trip’s defining moments, to the greater glory of everything else.  “Done that” is much more meaningful when you have, really and truly, “been there.”

The Vacation Path

A half-dozen “don’ts” to make your escape complete:

1. Don’t Talk -  If possible, don’t have anybody around to talk to.  Make arrangements with the guide for some time on your own, when it won’t be an inconvenience to the group or put anybody in jeopardy, (Lion or grizzly country, for instance, are bad places to be alone.)  If you must go with a buddy, make a pact to keep silent for a period of time.  Stick to it.  Talk, especially when you’re talking with somebody from your part of the world, takes you straight back home.  It also announces your presence to wildlife, most of which won’t show itself until you’re stone-still and silent.  It can take hours for the most alert creatures to forget you’re there and start moving.  The longer you keep quiet, the more you’ll have to talk about later.

2. Don’t Take Pictures -  Calm down, photophiles, it’s only for a few hours.  Wilderness itself is always better than pictures of wilderness.  If you do your hardest looking through a camera’s view finder, you’re looking at pictures instead of the real thing.  One of the great joys of adventuring is getting out of our modern image-reality warp, where the point of experience is to appear in images you’ve already seen, in order to show them to others.  Focus, for a few hours, on making images in your own eyes, which you can’t show to anyone else.

3. Don’t Read -  Wilderness literati like to haul along a nature classic or two and dip into the great words at great moments.  This does the writing and the wild world a disservice.  Give Thoreau a good read before you go, an you’ll see that he wouldn’t want you reading Thoreau - not out in nature.

4. Don’t Write -  Leave the daily journal in your tent, with the camera and books.  Write about your silent experience later.

5. Don’t Think -  Don’t think, that is, about anything that isn’t where you are.  The brain, like the rest of nature, abhors a vacuum.  The idea right now is to fill it with nature, lest it drag you back to workaday pressures and frets.  Get minutely interested in what you’re seeing.  Try and figure out what the beetle in front of you is up to.  Listen and match the calls with the birds you see.  Wonder how the world looks to one of those monkeys, way, way up in the trees.  Take sensory readings from the nose and skin.  Your attention can go where it will, but don’t quit paying attention.

6. Don’t Take It All So Seriously - All modes of travel come with theming and background atmospherics.  Adventuring tends to be serious, as if we’re really on ecological or anthropological field studies, original explorations, or supreme tests of survival skill and endurance - instead of on vacation.  This sense of mission isn’t entirely bogus.  Eco-travel may, after all, help save wild places and indigenous peoples.  Commercial adventuring can, indeed, be different and dangerous - witness the 1996 deaths of paying clients and their guides on Mount Everest.

But on most trips there’s a healthy measure of pretense.  We pretend we’re on serious missions, with heavy agendas, for the same reason vacationers in Las Vegas pretend they’re high-rollers.  It buzzes-up the experience.  It suits our fantasy lives.  It is, in a word, fun.  Don’t get all heavy about these silent hours of observation.  Smile at the wild world.  Don’t be surprised if it smiles back at you.

Why is eating slower healthier?

If I were to set time back to the primitive ages of man, when man had to fight to survive, and each meal had very good odds of being stolen by a savage competitor, only then would I say that eating fast would be okay.  But we no longer live in those times.

Today, we don’t have to fight to survive, and by fight I mean use an enormous amount of energy to find a meal for the night.  Instead, we sit in at our nine to five offices, drive everywhere, and sit on our behinds much of the time.  This means that eating faster would have been very acceptable in primitive times, since survival used energy.  But eating fast in today’s world is no longer a healthy way of living, especially for the non-active types. The reason is simple: More calories being ingested into a less calorie burning body.  So, eating slower can be one simple step in helping you actually lose weight.

How to eat slower

1. Savor you bites - Think about your food the next time you eat.  If you listen carefully, it might be saying, “Hey! Remember me, remember what I taste like?”  Don’t inhale your food, enjoy it.  Nobody is going to steal it from you.

2. Relax - I’ve seen many people get so excited for a good meal that once its in their hands they’re on a race to the finish.  One time, I was sitting with a person who was literally putting more food into his mouth before he had even chewed the last bite.  I asked him, “What’s the hurry?” He looked up at me with a mouthful and replied, “I just got excited.”  I understand that it may be hard for some people to calm their excitement, so instead of inhaling your food, channel your excitement in a different direction.  Get excited about each individual bite, not the meal.  Get excited about it’s texture, taste, and quality.  Get excited about where it came from and how it was cooked.  By getting excited this way, you may eat slower and enjoy your food much more.

3. Put down you fork - This one is simple: put down your fork between each bite.  This allows you to enhance the above.

4. Chew entirely - Always chew your food thoroughly and completely. Our teeth are an important part in the digestive system, so why not use them to their fullest ability?  There are taste benefits to chewing longer as well.  For example, bread becomes sweeter the longer you chew it and some foods hold their flavor through a long chewing process.

5. Consciously eat for 20 minutes - 20 minutes is the recommended amount of time to eat any meal.  Why? First, 20 minutes gives your body enough time to begin burning calories rather than overloading itself.  Second, if you eat a meal for 20 minutes, you’re body begins to tell itself that it is full.  If you eat fast, many times you’re body remains unfulfilled and still hungry, but by eating slower you feel fuller.

It is quite amazing how the recent movie, “The Bucket List” has already gave birth to a new phrase.  If you haven’t heard of it, a bucket list is a list of things to do before you “kick the bucket.”  Although I have not yet seen the movie (let me know what you thought if you seen it) I have decided to make my own.

My Bucket List

1.  Cook a holiday meal for the family

2.  Publish book(s)

3.  Run a marathon

4.  Own a bed and breakfast

5.  Live off the land for a year

6.  Go kayaking

7.  Learn at least two other languages

8.  Read the entire bible

9.  Skydive

10.  Meet a Zen or Buddhist Master

11.  Travel to:

• Western United States
• Australia
• Bodhi Tree
• Dubai
• Alaska

Please share your bucket lists!!

Update:

As I have mentioned earlier, I am spending my summer at an internship that involves serving the poor at a soup kitchen and working on an organic vegetable farm.  For the past two weeks life has been enjoyable and simple.  I will elaborate on my experience in a few days, so hold tight.  The internship is also the reason for me not posting as often which I will be doing much more.  Thank you all who have read and commented my past posts.  I appreciate it immensely and will try to keep up as much as possible.

Peace and Love,

Zack

Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.

-Henry David Thoreau

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In other words, what Thoreau means, is that the secret to happiness does not consist of you seeking it out for yourself. Countless times, people fall victim to their own ego.  This ego, this unconscious ego needs something else to be happy.  So, people go on living their lives never fully satisfied and search their entire lives for that one thing that they think will make them happy only to end up realizing right before their death that they could have been happy at any moment and that it was really their own thought and their own ego that kept them from their happiness.  In a sense, they really are their own worst enemy.

Thoreau then tells us to “turn our attention to other things.”  But what other things? Does being happy mean doing whatever we want?  I believe that these other things are the things that will benefit your authentic happiness and the authentic happiness of all other beings.  The Dalai Lama once said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” Only if you treat yourself with compassion can you then treat others with compassion and vice versa.

Very simply, happiness is selflessness or altruism.  Think of any negative emotion, such as anger, guilt, depression, fear, worry, etc. They are all selfish emotions in which someone thinks of his or her self. We may also concur that there are positive selfish emotions as well, like joy, pride, confidence, contentment, etc.  These emotions are positive, but temporary.  They still thrive on a time and place and can never be eternal.  So then what other things to we turn our attention to.  Merely whatever is happening now.  In any single moment, life can be experienced through a lens of pure bliss that we can form by removing our ego and creating an awareness of the oneness of all things.  By becoming part of the everlasting flow of life, we can only then become truly and wholesomely happy.  All pleasure, discontentment, attachment, and negativity merely fades away and what is left is a feeling of ethereal bliss.

How do I know this?  I believe everyone has felt absolute happiness at least once in their lives, but possibly did not know they had felt it or did not know how to make it last through their personal lives.  For example, when an artist paints he or she is fully wrapped up in the moment, completely aware of everything happening now with no dissatisfaction of the past, future, or present.  Even when someone washes the dishes or drives down the highway, an awareness of the current moment and a detachment from the ego can create happiness.  Even so, I have felt this and have become aware of the possibility of attaining happiness permanently, since all it consists of is an awareness of the present.  This simple method of putting forth effort to create an awareness and consciousness of the present allows us to see reality for what it is and any selfish emotions, positive or negative detaches from us effortlessly.

Have you ever got to the end of the peanut butter and tried to scoop the rest of it out with the knife?  It’s a tough job reaching in there and getting your hands sticky and peanut buttery.  It makes you want to cut the bottom right off so you can scrape it clean.  Well, I’ve got just the thing for you.  Introducing the easy PB & J jar:

The easy pb and j jar could easily be crowned the second best invention ever, right after the first best invention, peanut butter. This simple design allows the spreader to open the bottom of the jar as well, allowing easy access to the entire insides.  Just imagine all the delicious peanut butter that could be saved! And not only peanut butter, but as the site mentions, it could be a useful tool for “almond butter, cashew butter, pistachio butter, macadamia butter, hazelnut butter, or any other nut butter you can think of. It’s also good for mayonnaise, jams, jellies, fruit spreads, honey, pâtés, and other pastes. Never waste a single morsel ever again!”

What do you think? Any takers?