The Wildness Within

A recurring theme in the lives of many of my friends is that of uncertainty. Uncertainty about what it is we want to be doing with our lives. We are a creative bunch. Most of us have jobs that, at the very least, pay the bills. None of us, none that I can think of, love our jobs. There may be one or two of us who have a job that we believe matters – that the work we do contributes to society and that we are doing important work.

But, for the most part, we all merely tolerate our jobs. None of us are doing something for money that we love. And that breeds resentment. Resentment of our situations, and, on an inherent level, of ourselves. We resent that we are forced to work forty or more hours a week for someone else. We want to be creating art, or music, to be living and experiencing life instead of merely existing within it.

And we do create, but not nearly as prolifically as we would like. We drink to escape the disconnect we feel within ourselves. And I want to go one further, and say that the disconnect is much deeper, and that it is a disconnect from our own wild nature.

We are animals, we are wild beings. We are hardwired for wildness, even someone who has never left the city, even that person longs to be connected with nature in some fashion, because we are a part of nature. We were not meant to slave away for hours a day in a cubicle in front of a computer. We were meant to be outside, and because of that, our ancestors lived off the land, planted gardens from which they got their food, raised cattle from which they gained their sustenance. We are so disconnected from that, believing our food to come from Acme, or Safeway, or Albertsons, wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic. We put faux natural products into our bodies further removing us from our wild nature.

I am not romanticizing the lifestyle of people who came before us. I understand that working off the land is hard, but I believe that those folks had a better connection with the land, with nature, with themselves, and with their true wild nature.

I feel this everyday in my life, and am trying to pay attention to the occurrences of wildness in my daily experience. Even if it is something as simple as stopping on the way to work to smell the lilacs in bloom, something as simple as stopping for fifteen seconds to soak up the sunshine, warm on my face. Sometimes simply being aware of the wild nature we all have is a step closer to reconnecting with that wild nature.

I am much less articulate about this subject than is Becca.