Welp, May came and went without a blog post…oops.
But also, not oops. It was a full month. Not busy, not stressful, full. Full of fancy and boozy dinners with old and new friends, full of runs and workouts in the newly-warm almost-summer weather, full of change. I hired two new people to join my team at work and launched our next investment fund. My husband and I get to spend the summer with his son, so we picked him up from Tulsa and got him settled here in DC. We rescued a stray kitten and named her Alley Cat.
I also took a bunch of my friends and family camping for Memorial Day weekend together. One of my goals this year is to write a blog post each month. Another is to become a camping and hiking family. I guess sometimes different goals have to take priority. Insert “whatever-shrugging-lady-emoji” here.
Anyway, I didn’t grow up in a camp family, but for whatever reason in college I got hit with the urge to sleep in the dirt. I remember going to REI with my dad and letting him pick out all kinds of camping gear for me, most of which I still have over ten years later. He was so excited, because we don’t have that many shared interests, to talk to me about different types of sleeping bags and hiking boots and backpacks, and I’ve been camping more or less consistently and more or less successfully ever since.
Of course my husband takes my love of camping and puts it to shame with his set up. He has a tent that goes on the roof of his car. He has a kick-ass campfire grill. He has fishing poles. Our first trip together we camped instead of paying for a hotel room. It was one of the first things I fell in love with about him.
So it was really refreshing to get away from all the things in the city and spend some time in the woods. Even when things in life are going well, stepping away from it all can feel like a breath of *literal* fresh air.
As much as I enjoyed time with friends on the lake or around the campfire, my favorite parts of the trip were the quiet moments, sitting on the edge of the water and listening to the birds, or reading in the hammock and watching the little bugs crawling up the sides (note, I said little, because I did NOT, in fact, enjoy the large bugs that were also trying to dive bomb me). I returned to the noise of the city and the fluorescent lights of my office a little forlorn, and then read an essay in the newsletter Dense Discovery, part of which I’ll include here:
The pleasure we get from encountering nature can be explained through the biophilia hypothesis, the idea that humans have an innate affinity for life and living systems: “Human preferences toward things in nature, while refined through experience and culture, are hypothetically the product of biological evolution.”
It’s fair to conclude then that we need nature. But does nature need us? Probably not. Clive Thompson calls this the biophilia paradox: “Biophilia is asymmetric. We have biophilia, but nature doesn’t have ‘anthrophilia’. In fact, it’s the opposite: If humanity were to vanish tomorrow, the remaining plants and animals would set about rapidly reclaiming all the asphalted-over world we’ve created.”
There is a tragic irony here: our modern existence is largely incompatible with our biophilic need for nature. Our attempt to be closer to nature often comes at a cost to nature.
Tragic irony indeed. The hackles of my people-pleasing, external-validation-seeking, co-dependent nature stood up reading this. To love something as intuitively as I love being in the trees, and then to realize that the trees would probably prefer if I weren’t there at all.
Don’t worry, it gets (slightly) better. The essay continues:
“We humans should be living a little more densely, to give nature more space away from us. Meanwhile, to satisfy our biophilia, we should be designing more nature into these denser human environments – using everything from an increased number of street-plants to town parks to ‘living walls’ on houses, and buildings that use more natural materials. … We need plants close to us – and far away from us. That’s the biophilia paradox.”
One of the reasons I love living in DC so much is because of how close it is to great natural spaces. Sure, it’s not Colorado or California, but to me it’s the best of both worlds, big city and beautiful country within a one hour drive. And it’s interesting, because as I’ve been contemplating buying a house here I’m determined to either stay inside DC proper or go completely rural and buy a llama farm or something similar. There is no in between (I’m looking at you, suburbs) for me. Which is kind of fascinating because I also recently learned that like, tons of millennials are actually excited to live in the suburbs.
I don’t know. I’m not arguing any right or wrong here. I’m just sitting beside the window thinking back on a whirlwind month and a wonderful weekend while the sun streams in and the kitten sleeps on the sill. And there’s a nine-year-old boy yelling with his video gaming companions in the background while my phone pings with email notifications and the dog gently yet insistently nudges me with his nose for pets. Life’s a lot. Life’s always worth it. Whether in a row home in the city with weekends in a tent, or helping keep llamas alive in the middle of (almost) no where.