Feeling Alienated

It's a strange thing, to go away for a weekend and enjoy yourself, but to come back feeling... deflated isn't the right word. It's somewhat akin to the Sunday scaries that plague many of us in our modern work-lives. But it's not necessarily related to work itself. The more I've thought about the feeling I'm coming away with after a long weekend visiting friends in Kansas City is alienation.

And I think what's really happening is that I was already feeling this -- it's just that being with these friends brought that feeling to the surface. We didn't do too much, but these friends of ours are the camping/outdoorsy type of folks, have a pretty fruitful garden, and generally hold values about nature that Elaine and I also hold. The difference is that we have struggled to live out those values in the same way that they do. On Saturday, we spent most of the day at Clinton Lake out in Lawrence, KS. It was a pretty special day but nothing spectacular; we took the boat out, swam, tubed, swam some more.

On Sunday we just hung out and chatted and used some fresh veggies from the garden for lunch and dinner. And on Monday we left. It wasn't like it was some epiphany that I had. But the whole weekend, I felt like some part of my soul that's been buried was becoming uncovered. Some piece of myself that I didn't quite forget about but was becoming forgotten. I just love being outside. I feel better when I am in the sun, among water and plants and there is just a tiny bit of unknown in the experience, some piece that I have no control over.

I think I simply realized that I spend so much of my time in comfort because it's so easy to craft and control what you encounter when you work in front of a screen, live in constant AC, and spend weekends just vegging because you're mentally tired from a week of all of the normal wearing down of life.

This feels a little rambly. And I know I'm not the first person in the world to explore human alienation from nature -- it's been a problem we've been thinking about since at least early modernity.

Mostly I just want to write this down so I can remember, and perhaps remind myself down the road. I want to encounter nature more, to be outside, to grow my own food sometimes, to make trips to the mountains and rivers and woods and remember that I am small.

Tagged: personal,