2019 Was Interesting - I Hope 2020 Isn't

My back yard will soon see the Sun rising on a new year and a new decade.

2019 is coming to a close. It was interesting.

Interesting as in “May you live in interesting times”. 

I always thought that quote was of Chinese origin. Turns out it’s not.

In 1836 a British diplomat named John Francis Davis referred to a similar adage which circulated in China. 

He wrote,

“Better be a dog in peace than a man in war,” is a common maxim.  

“It is a general rule,” they say, “that the worst of men are fondest of change and commotion, hoping that they may thereby benefit themselves.  

But by adherence to a steady, quiet system, affairs proceed without confusion, and bad men have nothing to gain.”

The best evidence shows it was a Brit riffing off the Chinese maxim that coined the “Interesting times” quote that was meant as a curse.  

In that way, 2020 is likely to be just as interesting as this year was. Maybe more interesting.

It makes one hanker for less interesting times. 

However, society is so jacked up on fear, technology, and adrenalin that people are hooked on the stuff. It might be hard to quit. As a friend of mine asked once, "Wouldn't most people find enlightenment boring?" 

Not me. I am ready for a new year that is blissfully quiet, plain, and uninteresting. Let’s stretch and yawn, then proceed with clarity and calm to resolve our differences and common challenges.

When the time is right, let's lay out the mats and nap for a while. 

Preferably we can proceed in peace, without all the thrilling and ego-stimulating dramas that drive popular narratives. It is better to do nothing than a wasteful thing.

In the next 365 days we can collectively create a new story. We can work toward the development of alternative approaches to life that allow us to realize health, tranquility, and spiritual liberation.

Steady as she goes, I say. Don't over think things. Do everything by doing nothing. It's Nature's way.

Go ahead, 2020 - bore me to tears with your steady, unstimulating, ordinary, garden variety evolution guiding us toward a better world. 

Snowshoeing To Winter Cabin

First I pass through an old hemlock forest of giant woody columns holding a roof of snow canopies.

I can't think of a better way to end the year than by going for my first snowshoe of the winter. There was also a mission I needed to complete - get a winter photo of a snow-covered cabin for our blog banner so I can observe the official change of seasons.

Going down.

The cabin is on a brook in a valley behind my home. Going down on snowshoes is much more forgiving than boots on the ground. It is puffy, floaty, slidey, fun. Sharp pokey things are covered - everything is child-proofed and one can go anywhere and do anything.

Next to weightlessness, this is the best possible liberation from the potentially dangerous effects of gravity and friction while hiking. It never fails to put a smile on my face.

Impossibly puffy puffiness of fresh powdery snow.

Jumping and sliding down the valley side to the brook does not take long. The water is a tranquil spot to enjoy the sound of moving water, be still for a few moments, and see the scene, while being seen by the scene in turn.

At moments like this, spirits merge.

The winter landscape feels like a Chinese watercolour painting.

After reaching the brook I move upstream toward the cabin, which is on the other side of the water. Soon, there it is, all tucked in.

What a get-away. No power. No phone. No billboards. No shopping. No fences. No Gates. I'm not even sure if there is a road to the cabin.

I wonder what it would be like to live here. Very, very simple. Challenging. A lot of hard work. A deep solitude and tranquility - total separation from the affairs of humanity (or "inhumanity").

I think about pulling a Henry David Thoreau, naming this spot "Walden, Too", and embarking on an extended retreat. Never mind extended, even one night out here would be magical. Imagine a week. A month. Or a year.

My reveries are interrupted by the fact that the fading light had faded further. I start back up the hill, avoiding groves of conifers because their snow-draped canopies make it even darker below them. There is more snow under the open canopies of deciduous forest, and there the snowshoeing is best.

Everything looks unfamiliar and new in a thick winter jacket, but my homing instinct is strong. I get to the edge of the forest and start across the field. I see my own "cabin" at the top of the slope.

My "cabin" - heat, light, food, clean drinking water, and Linda are inside. Almost there.

I feel fortunate, recharged, and ready for another orbit around the Sun on this beautiful planet. It is good to be riding with all of you.  

Roughing It In The Woods

Last stop and resting place for this school bus conversion that I found while out for a bike ride in the woods.
It had a wood stove, gas range, counter tops, kitchen sink, two bunk beds, and tables to seat eight.
Landscaping provided by Mother Nature.

One reason I enjoy a stripped down lifestyle is because it is more like roughing it. I like roughing it, and always have. Tenting, living out of a van, cabin or shelter all bring one closer to living harmoniously in, and with, Nature.

There are lessons to be learned here, not all of them comfortable or easy.

Life is not suppose to be perpetually easy and luxurious. Nor is it in our DNA to live in chronic speediness and complexity. Civilization and its marketing branch, consumer culture, makes us soft, dependent, and unprepared to deal with change.

It makes us depressed and dumbed down.

Our bellies, our morals and our minds, all suffer from a morbid slackness, barely held together by thick leather belts of excuses and justifications. Lulled by the easy life, we come to lack intellectual curiosity.

We have been stupefied by stuff. Stifled by silliness. Stultified by the system.

Living simply in a consumer culture is a form of "roughing it". Like other forms of closer-to-nature living, it helps us appreciate what we have, is more physical and healthful, and fosters skills of independence and resilience.

In his book, A Walk In The Woods, author Bill Byrson talks about hiking and camping in a way that describes my experiences roughing it rather well.

"Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. 

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it."

I have always enjoyed the feeling I get while hiking, camping, and living on the road. Liked it so much, that it became the model for the rest of my life. I want to feel tranquil and content when I go out into the woods. But I also want to feel that way at home.

I want to feel that sweetness all the time. It is quite wonderful.

Finding Sanctuary In The Simple Life

Simplicity provides sanctuary from the buffeting winds of modern consumer life. In this place one will enjoy great inner peace.

I was crossing the field behind my house on snowshoes yesterday, headed for the shelter of the forest below. I was fighting my way through a white out while being buffeted by wind gusts reaching 100 km/hr. It was scary and strangely exhilarating, like life in general these days.

After almost being knocked over, I made it to the edge of the trees. More than other days, it really felt like going "into" the woods. In the open deciduous trees at the forest fringe, it was still quite windy, although I didn't feel like I would be blown away any more.

That part of the forest is like a vestibule, or covered porch. The real shelter is just a bit farther in where the spruce forest begins. The spruce forest grows close in, the trees not minding rubbing snow covered shoulders with each other.

It is here that one can find total reprieve from the wind, regardless of speed or direction. Although I could hear the freight train wind around me, where I was in the trees was complete calm and tranquility.

While the snow was blowing horizontally at face-stinging speeds in the field, just a bit farther on I stood in a pocket of peace surrounded by snow covered spruce. Here, unbelievably, the snow was gently falling straight down.

Afterwords, while warming up by the fire back at home, I thought of how a simple life is like that pocket of calm in the spruce trees. Living a slower life with fewer things with which to concern yourself, provides sanctuary from the wild storm of complication raging all around.

It was only because I knew that the forest would provide me with sanctuary as soon as I got to it, that I was fearless in striking out across the wind-blasted expanse of the open field. So it is with the sanctuary provided by simplicity.

I can engage in the world without fear of being blown away by it, because I am always able to return to the calm, tranquil existence that simplicity provides. And who couldn't use more peace, calm and tranquility in scary times?

For fast acting relief from the storm, simplify your life. A spruce forest is also good.

Tranquillity Mapping

Tranquillity is the experience of inner peace.

Being in tranquil places is one way that allows people to relax, escape from the stresses and strains of everyday life, and ‘boost their batteries’. But tranquil places are difficult to find on an increasingly crowded, developed planet. This is unfortunate for some thinkers equate tranquillity with inner peace and liberation.

How rare are tranquil places these days? So rare that researchers in the UK have been mapping them there in order to protect them. Their ultimate goal is to develop a national 'tranquility guide' for preservation of such areas, and so people can seek out these special healing spots.

One of the most important factors in people's descriptions of tranquil places in the study, was that the area be a natural landscape. Openness was also an important factor among several others.


Factors with positive impacts on tranquillity:

• a natural landscape 
• wide open spaces
• low noise levels
• presence of running water in rivers, streams and brooks
• lake and sea views
• birds and other wildlife
• clear open night sky with/without moon
• beach in a unique location
• forests
• open field, flora etc. with gentle to moderate breeze

Tranquillity map of Britain (green is very tranquil, red is least tranquil)

There were also several things that the people surveyed reported as making places less tranquil.

Factors with negative impacts on tranquillity:

• motorized transportation - cars, motorcycle, trains and aircraft 
• roads and railways
• light pollution
• large numbers of people
• pylons, power lines, masts and wind turbines
• noise
• urban development

The mapping study showed that tranquillity is not necessarily the absence of all noise, activity and buildings. Indeed it found that many rural activities, such as farming and cows calling, and natural noises such as birdsong and flowing water, enhance people’s experience of tranquillity.

A regional director of a local group dedicated to preserving natural areas as important havens which are under constant threat from development says, "Tranquillity matters to people and it needs protecting."

Ultimately, though, tranquillity is not found anywhere except in your head. It is possible to be troubled by a busy mind while immersed in quiet nature, just as it is possible to find tranquillity in the city, or your home or yard.

Being  present in the moment is one prerequisite, as is desirelessness, or the mental renunciation of desires for objects of pleasure. In other words, you have to be in the here and now, and you have to release your urges to cling to stuff before you can find true peace.

Tranquillity is always available to us, but it is covered in layers of distraction in the busyness of every day life. It is possible through presence and non-attachment to stuff and outside experiences, to peel the layers of distraction back until a calm peace of mind at the centre is able to shine through.

Beautiful places can help in this regard, but in the end each of us makes the decision to cultivate a calm and unagitated state or not.

May we all work toward being free from disturbances, and experience tranquillity as often as possible wherever we are.