[pct-l] Post Trail Adjustment & deep chords in living...

[jolson at olc.edu (Jeffrey Olson)]

I like the thread Paul started.  I think we don't do honest, authentic 
introspection enough here in America... 

While I'm a gearhead and have the money to indulge, all that is pretty 
surface and time-killing from within an alternate perspective.  More on 
that later...

I will say that I've used my SD Ultralightyear for five years or so now, 
and am going with the Summit Evolution IP for the next iteration of 
tent.  I got a lunar solo and didn't like how you had to tweak and tweak 
and tweak to get it taut.  I want to put up a tent, put my gear in it, 
and then myself.  I don't want to mess with it after it's up period.  
Plus, I like a double wall tent.  I sweat when I walk and hence like a 
poncho rather than a coat, and I sweat when I sleep, and like the double 
wall as a consequence. 

I also discovered I don't like hiking with hiking poles.  For me, they 
are just more weight to carry, and didn't do anything for my knees at 
all...  Keeping my pack as light as possible is my answer to knee 
problems, along with enough stretching.  Poles don't help me dance down 
the trail...  Now to the depths...

Saskia said, "I admire people that can be totally happy from within."   
Splash said, "Right now, I am taking baby steps to reassimilate. Hooooo 
boy. It's scary."  Paul quoted someone anonymously to say, "It's always 
been my thoery that long-distance hikers are self-medicating for 
depression, which returns forcibly as soon as the hike is over."

I've been teaching in a university setting for six years now, after 
three other careers unrelated to academia in any way.  One of my goals 
for my students is to get them to move beyond the social surfaces and 
actually be authentic in their questioning what they are told is true 
about living. 

I know that every PCT hiker who stays on the trail longer than 10 to 14 
days is confronted with their own version of the need to be authentic.  
What usually doesn't happen in college over four years can happen in two 
weeks or less on the trail.  The four years gives young people access to 
the opportunity to question but few actually apply the tools to their 
own lives.  Access to opportunity does not breed application of it.  
Horse to water... ETc...

Splash's statement is so honest, so expressive of a hard won 
vulnerability.  For me, her baby steps to reassimilate is the first or 
second or third effort to define what the truths are in living on her 
own terms.  It is not assimilation to the outer world that she 
attempts.  Rather, it is to see if her hard-won perspective gained from 
being-on-the-trail is strong enough to forge a path amongst the 
hypocrisy and delusion that defines most social experience.  What is so 
heroic about her (baby stepping) struggle is that social norms are set 
up to identify, target, and annhilate her unique learning and the 
delicate and beauteous perspective she's developing. 

Saskia's statement frames the dream that most of us hold for ourselves - 
to create our lives well enough to be happy.  I would change the noun 
happy to being-satisfied.  I can be happy in the moment due to a 
compendage of orientation and circumstance, but overall I cannot be 
happy.  Happiness for me is a situation/moment  expression of the larger 
venue of being-satisfied.  When I am more than less satisifed in what I 
do in my life, then I can recognize those moments and situations in 
which I am happy.  When I work on being-satisfied, I discover myself 
being happier and happier in more and more sundry, previously mundane 
and boring moments!!!

Forging a path amongst the hypocrisy and delusion creates 
being-satisfied, individual moments of which involve being happy.  Now, 
what about the anonymous statement about depression - "long-distance 
hikers are self-medicating for depression, which returns forcibly as 
soon as the hike is over."

Let's reframe this.  Depression as the statement assumes, is an 
individual characteristic.  "I" experience depression when I leave the 
freedom of the PCT for the confines of the work-a-day world, so mundane 
and small and limiting.  "I"m invisible in this world, the "I" that 
hikes 25 miles a day for four months, and has a personal history that 
includes this.  The feeling of being-depressed replaces the feeling of 
being-satisfied that spending more than two weeks on the trail engenders. 

What a person discovers after living life on her terms, is that the 
"normal" world of work, family, relationships therewithin, etc., does 
not key around being-creative and satisfied.  It almost appears the 
opposite is the case.  A person who has-hiked for a length of time feels 
invisible.  This experience has no social currency.  It is outside the 
frames of reference through which meaning and social value within the 
economic hierarchy are ascribed.  Being-rendered-invisible creates 
being-depressed. 

Depression is not an individual characteristic, but an unconscious 
response to social forces that annhilate beauty and creativity and 
justice!  The response is appropriate, as long as it is unconscious. 

When my response to being-dissatisfied by larger social forces becomes 
conscious, I no longer have to be depressed.  When I recognize that my 
depression is a mechanism by which larger social forces maintain 
themselves, benefitting a very few, creating suffering for very many, 
then I can validate my own unique perspective developed while hiking for 
x number of months, and teach myself (along with others hopefully) to 
create a world in which the experience of thru-hiking has currency. 

The "self-medication" the quote above speaks to is an unconscious way of 
articulating "I am creative and invisible in so-doing!"

Hiking for longer than a couple weeks opens up personal spaces in which 
self-discipline and creativity slowly emerge to frame the routines of 
the day.  When being-satisfied emerges moment after moment routinely, 
the pattern becomes "I am happy." 

The shock of entering a world that doesn't value this learning can be 
overwhelming and depressing.  it doesn't have to.  The personal becomes 
political when self-discipline and creativity enter into mundane 
relationships and transform social reality in-so-doing...

Every one of us feels Splash's dilemma in some degree during re-entry.  
It is in teaching ourselves to re-enter on our own terms, trusting they 
are right and true for us that obviates and transforms the socially 
engineered depression we feel for being-satisfied and happy in more and 
more moments. 

Onwards, further, always further...

Jeffrey Olson
Martin SD