First Retirement?
This is the term I have been using for the self-imposed break I took from regular jobs since July 2016. It has been 17 months so far but it feels like ages considering the number of places I have visited and people I met across 20 countries....If you want to know more why I started etc, read here
I have learnt a lot about the real world surrounding me (not the one with 30 km radius), and I will try to write tidbits in my blogs...In this specific one, lets focus on something I discovered about myself.
Connection to Nature -
Since I am on the road changing my scenery every week and spent most of the seventeen months amidst mountains, I have heard many questions such as
Don't you get bored in mountains?
How can you stay away from your home and family for so long?
Why do you visit Himalayas so often (after all it is the same mountain scenery)?
How can you sustain these?
What do you get here?
What do you get here?
Why are doing this to your career (you can always do these things after 60s)?
How can you stay in mountains for such a long time without any friends around?
It is really odd. When I am in a city surrounded by computers and brick walls, nobody asks me - how can you sustain this life away from the real earth - the lush green meadows, dense jungles, rivers mountains, oceans!!???
Nobody feels odd when we cut all the trees, build an apt complex and put a small park in it and tag it green complex!!
Nobody doubts oneself when the air becomes poison and people breathe that air giving reasons like better salary, bigger homes and opportunity for kids?
But somehow I can not think that way any more. I realized one thing in my first retirement. All my life (mostly spent in Metros), I have been missing this connection to Nature. Himalayas revived that connection. To me, this bond is as strong as that to my family.
Human beings are children of nature. We all have direct bonds to mother nature. Like my mother raised me even before I was born, I am also brought up by the elements of nature. Ignoring that is like loosing part of ones self. No education is complete without introducing the next generation to our roots to nature!!
Mostly people from cities are forgetting that simple fact. They may never know the smell of rains on grass, the changing colors of leaves, the sound of river on rocks, the crushing waves of oceans, the reflection of rays of Sun on snow clad valleys, the sunsets on mountain peaks and mystic fog of jungles....
To strengthen any bond, you need to spend one-on-one time with someone. We are not only forgetting to spend some time in solace amidst nature, we are also making it the lowest priority of life. Due to work, fitness, time and many other trivial issues, we strained that bond beyond the red line. Now, when most of us spend that one week in nature out of 52 in a year, we spend time with smartphone games, complain about the missing comforts and desperately wait for returning to meet the deadlines. Because we do not have time for that child in us - to meet her/his second mother..
And I am not the smartest guy either. I spent many many hours of my life dreaming about mountains, oceans and ignored the strong pull inside me in the name of career, power and money. I changed the definition of security every year to the connection. But then I met himalayas, the purest form of mother nature (next to my first home). The more remote I traveled, the less I talk to fellow trekker, the more time I spent looking at the sunset/sunrise, the less I deviate with human interventions.....the stronger the connection gets.
I am not saying only Himalayas can trigger that. I have seen beautiful villages/countryside a bit away from concrete jungle. Any place where human interventions did not destroy nature can act as that second home.
Yes, I have two homes now. A butterfly showing me paths in lonely jungle trails can become my friend. I can spend hours listening to a shy bird. I am not scared staying at a 5000m peak alone and I can come down through clouds without any human presence followed by Yaks. I do not get bored watching the hide-and-seek games of clouds with snow-clad peaks. This connection made me more conscious as well. Every lays packet or water bottle thrown in a mountain river gives me a lot of pain. I know I started becoming possessive as well. I do not like trekker groups shouting and talking aloud in my bonding times. But the love of mother nature has no bounds.
As it changed my life for ever, I hope my friends also try to experience their bonds to nature. Like they try to teach their kids piano, judo and cricket; they should take the next generation amidst nature (not the fake one in the comforts of resorts). May be then, we should be more nature-aware and find new meaning of our existence rather than chasing the rat race.
Human beings are children of nature. We all have direct bonds to mother nature. Like my mother raised me even before I was born, I am also brought up by the elements of nature. Ignoring that is like loosing part of ones self. No education is complete without introducing the next generation to our roots to nature!!
Mostly people from cities are forgetting that simple fact. They may never know the smell of rains on grass, the changing colors of leaves, the sound of river on rocks, the crushing waves of oceans, the reflection of rays of Sun on snow clad valleys, the sunsets on mountain peaks and mystic fog of jungles....
And I am not the smartest guy either. I spent many many hours of my life dreaming about mountains, oceans and ignored the strong pull inside me in the name of career, power and money. I changed the definition of security every year to the connection. But then I met himalayas, the purest form of mother nature (next to my first home). The more remote I traveled, the less I talk to fellow trekker, the more time I spent looking at the sunset/sunrise, the less I deviate with human interventions.....the stronger the connection gets.
I am not saying only Himalayas can trigger that. I have seen beautiful villages/countryside a bit away from concrete jungle. Any place where human interventions did not destroy nature can act as that second home.
My second home....
Yes, I have two homes now. A butterfly showing me paths in lonely jungle trails can become my friend. I can spend hours listening to a shy bird. I am not scared staying at a 5000m peak alone and I can come down through clouds without any human presence followed by Yaks. I do not get bored watching the hide-and-seek games of clouds with snow-clad peaks. This connection made me more conscious as well. Every lays packet or water bottle thrown in a mountain river gives me a lot of pain. I know I started becoming possessive as well. I do not like trekker groups shouting and talking aloud in my bonding times. But the love of mother nature has no bounds.
As it changed my life for ever, I hope my friends also try to experience their bonds to nature. Like they try to teach their kids piano, judo and cricket; they should take the next generation amidst nature (not the fake one in the comforts of resorts). May be then, we should be more nature-aware and find new meaning of our existence rather than chasing the rat race.
Me in the second home (taken by a stranger at Annapurna Base camp)
