Camping

Those of you that know me probably wouldn't describe me as an "outdoors person". I've always enjoyed my creature comforts--A/C, hot showers and eating food I don't have to worry about having been dropped in the dirt.

Or at least that's what I told myself.

During the past several months, I've been re-examining my personal philosophies. (I'm sure many of you have had to listen to me rant about one aspect or another of this) I'm trying to make some changes in my life (never stop learning or growing), but I've been running into some brick walls. I've stopped short of several goals, and I can give you reasons why. But most of them are crap. Actually, I'm sure that *all* of them are crap.

They almost always stem from a basic fear of failure. I'm pretty sure that everyone deals with this in one way or another. But now that I've spent some time examining it, I found that it's a big negative force in my life. This fear has stopped me from more things than I'll ever admit to.

So I've been doing a lot of reading on how best to deal with this. One of the ideas I came across (and is relevant to the post) is one from Seneca:

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: "Is this the condition that I feared?"

Although this quote applies to many different situations for me, I took it literally when some friends asked if I wanted to go camping over Easter weekend.

While everyone else packed what seemed to be most of their belongings and we had a couple of huge tents to sleep in, I tried to keep it very simple. (at least for me) Essentially, I took a sleeping bag (with a travel pillow and Thermarest mat--I'm not trying to torture myself), a change of clothes, water bottle and Letters From A Stoic. Oh yeah, and I took my camera, too.


We camped in McKinney Falls State Park. It was a nice and well-maintained park. And while the weather was overcast all weekend, the park wasn't too busy. There were times we could hike for 30 minutes without running into anyone else.


We kept the agenda fairly simple: a little food, hiking, bike-riding, some geocaching and just sitting around the campfire (that we wish we could build, but couldn't because of a burn ban).

We left a day early because of a large storm coming through, but I accomplished what I wanted. Two days of living as simply as I can handle and I didn't die. Nope. No permanent damage. I actually enjoyed the heck out of it. I'm planning to head back to REI to buy a tent and make this a semi-regular thing.