A Touch Of Nature: Dirt Is Good For You And Other Lessons
What makes someone rise early to watch the sun slowly ascend toward the horizon from a nearby hill? Why would anyone spend their annual vacation wandering about in Canyonlands National Park’s remote Maze District year after year? What sane person would decide to spend weeks riding a bike across Southeast Asia after her internship was up?
I’ll do my best to explain, but first you should know that I’m biased. I think the daft ones are the people that find none of these appealing. All of them are actual examples, though only getting up early to watch a beautiful sunrise is likely to be the one most people can identify with. To experience nature’s capacity to calm and heal, that’s often enough.
But before you dismiss the people for whom the occasional sunrise or sunset isn’t quite adequate— the ones that will drop everything for the chance to spend a day, a long weekend, or even weeks in a dusty remote wilderness — it’s worth noting that science and more than a little anecdotal evidence is, with the exception of few asterisks, on their side. This is even true if you include weeks long treks across distant continents where human contact is more common, even if it is limited to people speaking other languages and engaging in practices that, from an outsider’s perspective, range from exotic to downright disgusting.
