47nil

A Blueprint For Better

I recently emailed a friend I haven’t seen or heard from in many years, he came to my thoughts and I was wondering how life was. The reply that I received a few days later made me very sad. He is not doing well, mentally. He is coping with a lot of shit on a personal level but, mostly, with a lot of shit related to the current state of the world.

He sounded really down and desperate. I didn’t know what to say.

So, I only wrote what I did many years ago when I was in the same situation and went through similar shit.

I’m still going through that shit, but having done what I describe below helped me get to a better place. Maybe I should do it again, follow this sort of blueprint for a better life, and get to the next level of better.

Note: This works for me. Might not work for you. Just take it with a grain of salt, and understand that I’m in the same shit as we all are. I’m just a geek trying to get better. I’m not a mental health professional, so please if you are experiencing bad thoughts search for help. I can’t help you with this.

The blueprint that worked for me was:

Move close to nature
Get a dog
Live simply

I mentioned before that I love open spaces. Places that make me feel the immensity of this world, and force me to have to cope with it.

Nature, even just a walk in a forest or a beach, can do wonders for you. It certainly does it for me. Every time I would go climbing, or hiking, or even just for a long walk by the mountains, I would come back refreshed, renewed, and ready for the next. So when I went spiraling down hard, almost to a breaking point, I decided that I needed to be closer to nature.

I moved to a small town, surrounded by forests and mountains. And within days, literally, I felt relief. I made it a point to walk and be outside. Even just sitting under the sky was so good.

However, I still had a lot of anger, regrets, and despair in me, and at the suggestion of a good friend, I got a dog.

A dog is simply magic. It’s awesome.

A dog provides companionship, and it’s just there for you. It gives you unconditional love, always happy to see you again.

We can also learn a lot from dogs. I learned a lot from mine. Dogs don’t make a sound unless they have to. So I learned silence, and in doing so, I learned to just observe and listen. I began to get better. I learned through my dog that it’s OK to sit in silence and that there is no need to constantly speak, just to break the silence. But, if I needed to let anything out of my chest, I could speak to the dog, and the dog would not judge. My dog became my “sin eater”. It became my therapist and confidant. My dog allowed me to empty my anger, not in a violent way, but by speaking my anger aloud to him. And in that special “I sense you” way that dogs have, it would come and lay by my side, often by a fire, and we would just lay there, in silence, enjoying each other’s company.

And we would go out in nature. Long walks and explorations. This made my mood better and better every day. It was just amazing.

The last piece is something I’ve always done, but by moving to a smaller place, and by being close to nature I had to embrace fully. Living simply.

To me, living simply was a combination of literally living a simple life, with few things, and enjoying the small things that life has to offer, especially in nature. Living simply is focusing on the day to day, on the acts of doing things. It's chopping wood in the morning, it’s taking breaks to enjoy nature, it’s enjoying a good simple meal with a nice glass of wine. Living simply released a lot of the stress I was experiencing.

Living simply to me is also about giving yourself fully to whatever you want to master in life. It’s learning the craft you would like to be better at. It’s becoming more efficient at the things you love to do. It’s training and working and planning the next adventure. It’s giving yourself fully to the tasks.

So, living close to nature, sharing it with a dog, and living a simple life, is the blueprint.

And now I’m at that point when I will need to do this again, and maybe help my friend with this as well. And my dog and I will again wander the awesome world we have, before it’s gone. Before we burn it to the ground, and before we can no longer enjoy it.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful film from Patagonia.