Wednesday, January 9, 2013

A Probable Unnecessary Explanation

Wow!  I’m due for another post.  Weeks go by sooooo quickly!  I’ve been reading a really good book by a fellow Madisonian called “Appalachian Trials” by Good Badger (hint: that’s his trail name).  He had never been backpacking his entire life when he decided to take on the AT.  In his book, he goes through his preparations and planning, his actual hike, the things he learned on the hike, and then post-hike lessons as well.  My last post hinted a bit at the post-hike, i.e. post-trail depression and that fear of who will I become while I’m emulating Grizzly Adams.

Today, I think I’ll talk about some of my reasons for being on the Trail.  This should be a lot more uplifting than speculating on my post-trail fears.  However, let me also start out by saying that my admissions to these reasons are actually MORE scary for me to tell you then it is for me to talk about my failures, my depressions, my fears.  Why?  Because now I’m letting you in on my dreams.  I’d much rather talk about my shortcomings.  Those are much more obvious, and I don’t have to suffer from laughter, rejection, or awkward silence as we all sometimes experience when we dare give light to a deep-dwelling dream.

You see, other people know us.  At least, they THINK they know us.  They know what we show them.   But we have all become less than ourselves in this world.  We have learned to hide, to polish off, or even sometimes to amputate parts of ourselves in order to fit in, to look, well “polished” instead of the diamond in the rough.  And often, that can be a good thing.  God forbid I was the same person and personality from years ago!  However, sharing dreams and hopes and desires is probably the most vulnerable thing a person can do.  You put something like that out there in the world, and it’s likely to get lopped off.  Or at least chipped.  And that by the people who love you most.  Not because they are mean, nasty people.  But rather because they are simply closer.  Close enough to accidentally chip into your dream, to knock it over, to step on your toes.  Because they are close.  And that’s good.  It just means that it’s painful.

So, before I go into some of my reasons for being on the Trail, let me editorialize a bit further.  If you are going to regularly read this blog, I may say or discuss things that may come as a bit of a surprise to you.  Does that mean I’ve been “hiding” from you all these years?  No, probably not.  It just means that, over the years, I’ve found that certain aspects of my personality jive better with certain people, and other parts of my personality jive with others better.  So, I tend to downplay varying interests or actions around varying people.  Some might call this two-faced.  I call it adapting. 

Let me give you an example.  Here is something you might be able to expect in future posts: I might use the occasional swear word… right alongside musing some profound mystery of God’s love.  I might get the opportunity to share a cigar or a stiff drink with someone on the trail… I have found a cigar and stiff drink often opens up the conversation to talk about the more meaningful and spiritual things in life.  I might be awestruck by a beautiful sunset in one paragraph, and then mentioning specific reasons some people should not hike naked on Hike Naked Day in the next (which, by the way, is June 21 – no, it’s a real day!).  So, in other words, I may sound really “super-spiritual” one moment, hyper-intellectual in another moment, and totally bawdy and immature the next.  Personally, I don’t see a problem with that.  However, experience has taught me that many people do.  When I’m in different groups of people, I can adapt.  But this blog is a general call-out to all humanity, so you’re just going to get whatever is in my little brain at that moment in time. 

Fair warning – nothing is off limits – Bon Jovi, Star Trek, belly-dancing, hookahs, CS Lewis, country music, Thoreau, the Bible, zombies, hippies, spirits, body checks for ticks, and flatulence.  It’s all just a hodgepodge of quirkiness rolling around in my brain together.  And I totally see me thinking about such things while walking 2200 miles.

OK, enough editorializing.  You have been warned.  Tomorrow I will post my reasons.

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