Changes...

They happen gradually on the trail, but they indeed happen...changes to your body and mind. Being out in the wilderness, in the wilds, awakens thousands, if not millions of years worth of instincts that have been slowly driven out of us as we live our concrete-enveloped lives. These instincts are suppressed by the daily stresses that we impose on ourselves such as improper diets, lack of exercise and fresh air, living inside our air-conditioned boxes day after day waking up and going to bed at times other than what our body would like. We create an artificial environment which robs us of our natural rhythms and spend almost all of our waking days there, rarely venturing out into nature.

While it's true that we all have to make a living, our workplace with its artificial lighting and artificial atmosphere, slowly robs us of our natural strength and vitality until we wake up one day wondering why our backs hurt so much, why we are tired all the time and why we just don't seem in tune to the world around us. We try to escape to the mountains or the ocean or someplace else for a week or two, and during that time, we recover slightly and are refreshed. But after only a couple days of returning to the grind, we find ourselves right back in the same rut, almost as bad off as we were before our vacation. If we could only win the lottery, we think to ourselves, day after day.

Spending a long period of time in the wilderness resets this clock. It erodes the wear-and-tear effects that break down our body, mind and spirt, and helps bring balance and normalcy back to our being. We find that peace, and discover that it didn't actually reside in the woods, but within ourselves. It just took us being out in the woods to find it again. The Appalachian Trail is but one place that can help you find this.

Some of the first changes you notice after being out in the wilderness for a while, are the daily aches and pains of your body telling you, "hey bub...you're supposed to be in an air-conditioned cubicle relaxing and surfing the web." You hurt often and regularly, at least for a little while. This is from your body moving in ways it maybe hasn't moved in years. It is the awakening of muscles in your feet, legs, hips and the rest of your body that haven't been exercised like that before, or at least in a while. If you are gentle and listen to your body, you will adapt, and the pains will subside eventually as it gets used to the new activity. But you must be open to what your body is telling you, and you must listen. It knows what it needs.

Your vision, blunted from years of artificial lighting and a two dimensional computer screen, will change making colors more vivid. Your depth perception will improve as you exercise the muscles in your eyes. You will see better when it is darker outside and in lower light levels, and sometimes at night when the moon is full, you will see quite well without a flashlight. You will notice very small animals that you might not have noticed before and the seemingly unlimited color pallete of nature will open up right before your eyes in all its splendor.

Your hearing will improve. No longer jammed with the sounds of hard-to-hear cell phone calls, earphones, loud stereo music, beeps and tones, you will hear a wider range of sounds from rustling leaf noises to shrill and faint bird calls a mile away. You will learn to distinguish animal calls and will hear sounds in nature you might never have noticed before. The sounds of rushing water from streams and water falls will soothe and calm you, and as the waters carry away the dead and decaying debris of the forest, so will they help carry away the decay of dread of the concrete world you have left behind.

Your sense of touch will improve. You will touch hot things, cold things, lukewarm things, soft things, hard things, artificial materials, natural materials and everything in between. To touch a 500 year old oak tree and ponder how the world has changed while this tree simply grew on this one spot is amazing in itself. To touch sedimentary rock formations that are millions of years old, an age measured by geologic time because that many years is impossible for us to fathom is amazing. To stand at the tip of a mountain top and touch the marble slabs at its peak and to look down at the ridges that were once filled with mile-deep sheets of ice is incredible to imagine.

Your sense of taste will improve as you begin to drive out those daily artificial colors and sweeteners from your body which are dozens of times more potent than they need to be. Food which you might have once doused with flavorings might only need a pinch of pepper or drop or two of hot sauce. You will begin to not want these artificially prepared foods as much, and start craving more healthy and natural foods as you begin to get in touch with what your body needs and not what you are told you want by advertisers. You will enjoy foods more, and appreciate them more because they are not surrounding you in such abundance, 24 hours a day.

Your sleep routine will change and you will find yourself getting tired and going to bed when the sun goes down and waking up when the sun begins to rise. You don't go to bed at 1AM in the wilderness like we do in our homes. Our body gets us up when the sun begins to rise, not at 5AM because we have to shower and hit the road before rush hour. On the trail we often sleep 10-12 hours because it's what our body needs and we have a lot more energy as a result. It's all about connecting.

The changes that wilderness life brings to us include these things and many more. If you think about it, it really helps bring us back in touch with the millions of years of evolution which brought us here today and that make us who we are.

It's easy to get so stressed out with our lives. Trust me on this, I know only too well. But the good news is that relief is available to us, not just the temporary kind that we feel during a vacation and which fades as soon as we return, but life changing relief that can take us from our daily challenging lives full of stress and challenges and deliver us to a place of peace and contentment.

It's all out there in the wilderness, we just have to decide to go out and get it.