Breaking Away from the Stampede To Nowhere
Last weekend I had the unparalleled pleasure of camping at one of my favorite spots on the Niobrara River. Just me, my dad and my dog, in our 1965 Ford schoolbus-turned-awesome-RV. The weather was perfect—high 70s with night time lows in the 50s (perfect sleeping weather). The river was just cool enough to be invigorating, but not uncomfortable.
And while I’m not one to make elaborate annual vacation plans, preferring instead the freedom of spontaneous random outings, as an end-of-summer wrap-up, the camping trip was a perfect punctuation to the end of the season.
Where we were camped—in a low-lying river valley between two rows of chalkstone bluffs—there was no wifi, no cell service, no satellite connection. Some might call that a lack of connectivity; I call it the perfect opportunity for real connection—the natural kind. The kind so many of us no longer take time to appreciate; the kind we are actually forgetting exists—connection to nature, grounded in the breath-by-breath present moment, being truly anchored in our surroundings and our embodied existence within the environment. Connecting, truly, to the people (and animals) with whom we are sharing that particular small space of time. Being fully aware that this exact opportunity will not happen again, and holding space for a reverence that comes with understanding we don’t get do-overs.
What passes for normal life these days can give one a sense that life just keeps going on indefinitely—until tragedy jars us from that illusion.
Too often, we are so caught up in our race through life, we forget where it is we are rushing to, and can’t even remember how we ended up joining the stampede in the first place. This relentless busyness and stress, feeling rushed just to keep up, turns into a horror version of the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day once we realize the finish line is merely a mirage, and there will always be more to do, things to acquire, and people to please. But our exhaustion is real, and it is a common side effect of this modern life. Not only is our time mapped out for us, days and weeks in advance by pressing schedules, and endless To Do lists, we are also pressured by the continual feed of images, reels and clips of all those seemingly perfect lives on open display on social media, leaving us wondering: Why don’t I have a perfect (fill in the blank) like that? What am I doing wrong?
The truth is, much of what we see online is a carefully curated highlight reel, not the full, messy, human story. The flawless family vacation photos don’t show the airport meltdowns, and the beautifully organized homes don’t reveal the piles of laundry just out of frame. This unrealistic portrayal creates an immense, invisible pressure to live up to a standard that simply does not exist. Even though, on some level, we all understand this, our constant exposure to such fictitious images creates a silent competition where everyone is pretending to be a winner, and the prize is an empty feeling of inadequacy.
Breaking away from this Stampede To Nowhere is not about cultivating complacency or relinquishing goals, it is about defining our endeavors, and the pace of our lives, on our own terms. It is about trading the pursuit of having a life like someone else’s highlight reel for the authentic reality of our own existence.
Friends and family are always giving me a hard time about not taking pictures when I’m visiting, or traveling. The truth is, I am often too happily engaged in the experience of being where I am, doing what I’m doing, with whomever I happen to be with, to disrupt the flow by pausing to pose in order to capture the moment. In my experience, by the time the image has been successfully captured, the magic of the moment no longer exists. While there are times when I may regret not having photos to look back on, I would much rather enjoy my sunsets, thank you very much, without needing to snap a pic to post in order to validate the experience.
Strained mental health, sky-rocketing anxiety and social distress are real world problems that are a fairly new phenomenon in our daily lives—and not coincidentally in direct correlation to our increasing consumption of social media. For all the hype about cell phone use and the internet “keeping people connected,” the truth is, real life isn’t lived only from the neck up, or when focused on external validation instead of internal motivation.
We make excuses when we let others down, or don’t have the energy to be truly present with those we love—begging off with a defense justified by our fatigue. And the insanity just keeps on going as we shrug and validate each other’s busyness (craziness) with an understanding smile.
As my late husband used to frequently remark, “Life is about choices.” And the truth is, reclaiming our time and peace is actually not all that difficult. My weekend of real connection—the kind that doesn’t require a device, but offers a bandwidth of benefits no cable is capable of handling—was a pleasant reminder of this fact.
Our lives are truly our own to live, and no one else’s. And the pace we are most comfortable with is the only one that truly matters.
The Stampede To Nowhere can end the moment one decides to break away from the herd and stop running.
