My growing longing for isolationism within our consumer based society has become more apparent in the last month or so. I realize that I’m already drifting away from long term friendships and new friends alike isolating myself with ideas of adventure and exploration.
It scares me half to death that my friends ideals at the age twenty-one and twenty-two are that of people in their thirties and forties. It is no wonder we now have a crisis in our twenties and midlife. Some of my friends are out trying to getting married, start families, buying houses, and putting deposits on fancy cars. Why? It has been soaked into our brains since were young that if you have these things you will successful and happy. It is what our parents have and wanted, and theirs before it has to do with our genetics it almost seems. I know it is what my parents always wanted for me. I often feel regret towards not achieving the ideals my father instilled in me to have. I regret things like not going to university or college and achieving these things he wanted for me because I feel I let him and my mother down.
But this not my ideology on how I should live my life. I believe that to be truly successful in life it is not the measure of money or possessions you own but it is how you feel about yourself and whether you feel truly happy with the person you’ve become.
Right now I feel to be truly happy with myself I have to pack up and experience all the world has to offer. I’ve seen the Canadian Shield, the blowing wheat of the prairies, mountains of British Columbia, and the majestic Pacific Ocean. In my many tour across our vast land I’ve often wondered what the stars look like elsewhere and how the moon looks in foreign lands.
I often feel I am bound and gagged to spend the rest of my life being unhappy with who I’ve become if I stay here. I find myself in a dream like McCandless used to before moose hunters found him dead in a bus in the Alaskan Frontier. Yesterday I thought of myself buying a canoe and abandoning the world I know for a month. Traveling to some place of great Canadian wilderness getting into my canoe and going on and adventure to call my own.
I’ve talked of great action and adventure but what real adventure and exploration is left in a world that has already been mapped. When this thought of the world being smaller and more traversed then it is I think of the writings of Twigger, McGregor, Boorman, and Simon. They are people who in a day and age of technology and consumption left their homes and families in the spirit of quest and adventure. These men conquered what some had claimed to be impossible and when the world got large and unraveled its vastness they achieved what so many haven’t in hundreds of years.
We all achieve our own greatness for some of us it is on our own terms and unfortunately for the rest it is on someone else’s terms.
Don’t worry I will be successful just you wait and see.
