Belong

CATEGOLY: Life
DATE OF EVENT: 1999

I changed so much. I became a different person. I see things differently. I think differently. I have different philosophy and belief. I don’t think the cause of the changes was not only because I experienced a different culture. It’s because I found a true meaning of my life in the Crowsnest Pass in the Rocky Mountains. Two years later I looked back about the feeling I had during the stay in the Rockies and I wrote an essay for a class. This is some parts of the essay and this essay was written to myself in the future.

“You want to feel you are living. You needed to know you are a life form. You can’t feel it if you are in a city where buildings surround you, and where ground is covered by concrete. You can’t feel it if you breathe polluted air, and drink poisoned water. There is only one way to feel it. Go into the wild. Go away from human society and experience wildness. Feeling of living comes from adventures. Adventures come from endless exploring of new places, fighting against fears that make you back off, and resisting mother nature. I don’t want you to forget that our life desire is to feel you are living.”

“What did you learn from the Rocky Mountains? You never know what the real nature is. You used to hate hiking because you could not quit in middle of the way back. You had cared so much about your social skills, school achievement, and future career before you moved to the Rocky Mountains. It was your turning point. After you had moved, and seen the real nature, your idea of human life had changed to the completely opposite direction. Now you thought caring so much about social skills, school achievement, or future career was dumb. They were so small things to care about, because in nature, money is a useless piece of paper, and position in human society is nothing. You didn’t have to worry about preparation for your old age or house loan. Many people just forget there is a world that we don’t have to take care of those human society anxieties. It is wild and it is where we all life originally came from. The relationship between wildness and you was the most important.”

“Do you care if you step on an ant, and kill it? You probably don’t. I didn’t care. I remember I used to kill many ants when I was a child. I had killed them for fun, but there were some ants that survived from my execution, and climbed my back, and I couldn’t get them off of it. You wanted to be the ant that survived, So. In the wild, a human is like an ant. Wild doesn’t care about a human’s death. It can easily kill humans, or any kind of life forms, but you wanted to be the ant. You wanted to survive from wild’s harsh condition, climb the top, and show the wild that, ‘Hey, you can kill me anytime you want, I am a small and weak thing to you, but I am still able to climb you, mother!’”