The outdoors made me a good dad.
Thanks, nature.
Before I became a dad, I worked in the outdoor industry for over a decade and a half.
The jobs I held were all across the board, from camp counselor and adventure trip leader to the ever-controversial guiding job in wilderness therapy. I held my job as a wilderness therapy guide for just shy of eight years backpacking in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina and the canoeing through the island rainforests of Southeast Alaska. I understand the issues that people have with the field, and I don't disagree.
But I do have pride in the work I did. I don't want this musing to be about that though. Sadly, I do feel the need to put that label anywhere I talk about my past in the industry.
So let's move on, because I had to.
People talk often about the power of nature. I wrote my entire Master's thesis on the power of outdoor adventure and how long expeditions can greatly influence the way we identify with the natural world. There are books and books and books written on the subject.
To me, it still doesn't feel like enough.
Our lives are chapters of different stories that all build on one another. The later chapters might not make sense without the context of reading the ones that come before, and some chapters in the beginning leave you wondering if there was a reason for whatever was going on.
I don't work explicitly in the outdoors anymore (a fact I'm heartbroken by), but that chapter of my life has helped write the story that I'm living right now.
In my first month of parenting, I've had a couple of huge, and plenty of small, realizations about how important my past is in how I show up today.
The outdoors has formed me. It's changed me. It's challenged me, disappointed me, scared the shit out of me, made me feel alive, gotten me sober, thrown me into love, helped me through heartbreak, and now, it's helping me be a dad.
I've tried to boil it down to just five lessons I've taken from my time outside, while in reality, there's no true number I could put on that list. Like I said, I am who I am because of these years spent living in the trees.
But these are important ones that I would like to pass on to you, no matter who you are. There are lessons to be taken from each one of these little insights, but for context, I'll speak to them in terms of parenting.
The world is going to do what the world is going to do.
As humans, our need for control over everything can be detrimental to our lives. We want to control every little aspect of our day to day movements, just so we can feel safe and secure. It's a valid point, but the world doesn't work like that.
I remember hitting the midway point of a shift that was thirty-five days long and realizing that we had yet to have a day without rain.
For anyone who hasn't worked in the outdoors, I'm here to tell you, rain is hard.
It's hard mentally, and it's hard physically.
Thirty-five days of it (at which point some of my former co-guides scoff and tell stories of fifty or sixty day shifts of it) can drive you to sheer madness.
In the "regular world", we run through it. We talk about dodging rain drops as we move from the safety and comfort of our houses into the safety and comfort of our cars. Then again into the office, supermarket, etc.
Working in a rainforest brought me to a point where I noticed mold beginning to grow on the inside of my rain gear. You realize that you're never really dry. And it starts to hack away at your mindset. At some point, I would start quietly bargaining with the world to make the rain stop for even an hour.
But that's not how it works.
The world is going to do exactly what it's going to do, no matter what you ask of it.
There are so many things beyond our control that we only fall into emotional turmoil when we try to get ahold of them. And letting go of that need for control, especially when it comes to things bigger than us, is the only way through and forward.
And yes. A baby is much, much bigger than you or me.
So accept it. Accept that it will rain. Accept that the baby will cry. Sometimes both those things happen simultaneously for weeks on end. Making a deal with the devil to hope it stops will only create a false sense of hope that drags you further down when the genie doesn't appear out of the magic lamp.
That's what I'm taking forward into fatherhood. We're in a moment where the world needs more and more of this. There's chaos everywhere. So settle in and let go of it.
It's that, or be miserable. Your choice.
It doesn't really matter if you make it to the next spot.
Our expeditions in the wilderness were all about moving from one campsite to another every single day.
An expedition implies movement, but the one thing is doesn't ensure is an end goal.
Sometimes, kids would realize that we were back at the campsite we were at a few days before, and would start asking why we even got up to move. Why couldn't we just stay still? It was, after all, a hell of a lot easier to not pack up camp and carry thirty pound storage bins across rocky beaches to throw into a boat in the middle of a storm.
The end goal was always a contrived thing. It was never truly real.
And this comes back to the classic adage of "it's about the journey, not the destination."
We get so focused on this ever-present goal in the future that we're working toward that we forget to enjoy the present. And then, when the time comes, we reach our goal and it's disappointing, or at least nowhere near as exhilarating as we had built it up to be.
As a parent, it's so easy to strive for the next big milestone that your kiddo reaches. It's so easy to think that the joy of your kid's childhood relies on this, that, or the other thing. But that focus on achieving a certain anything is the biggest obstacle in the way to creating a truly happy life for both you and your kid.
As soon as I figured out that I need to shift my mindset wholly to enjoying the present moment with my baby boy, I was relieved of all the anxiety and pressures around getting anywhere else. As he goes through his six-week growth spurt, I find the concept of thinking ahead to fill my mind constantly, waiting for days that are just a bit easier.
But that destroys this moment for me.
It doesn't really matter if I make it where I'm going. In reality, all I have is now.
So cry on, buddy boy. I'm here for ya.
Make sure you have water.
This one is possibly disappointing as there's not that much behind it other than the fact that you need to stay hydrated, and so does that baby.
In babydom, having water also means having a decent humidifier and a mom who's over hydrated. As a dad, that means topping both up as often as possible.
Drink water damnit.
The bears aren't always as scary as they seem.
Time in the backcountry usually (and should always) require some level of education on the dangers of being out there. So there are often a lot of videos of bears.
The stories around bears are usually fear-based, which makes sense because of the whole "they can kill you so easily" thing.
But they aren't always terrifying.
When I was laying awake one night yakking it up with a former co-guide, finishing up paperwork, we were listening to the group of girls we were working with in the tent.
I kept hearing something, but I had no idea what it was. Every time I sat up and beamed my headlamp in some direction, there was nothing there. Every time I laid back down, I heard it again.
Eventually, I sat up again, shined my light toward the tent, and immediately heard the earth-quaking sound of a massive fart coming from one of the girls in the tent.
Laughing hysterically, I laid back down and laughed at myself for being convinced it was a bear in camp.
The next time I heard something and shined my light, a black bear stood there staring right back at me with a back full of a week's worth of human excrement hanging from its mouth. Instantly brought back to reality after a short trip into the hysterics, I chased the bear off, cleaned up, and eventually got to sleep.
Bears.
These poor creatures that have been made to be the terror of the outdoors.
In truth, when you get to know them and understand them, they're of course still dangerous, but they're also just animals trying to live their lives until we barge in on them in their homes. And the fear grows from the few occasions of scary shit happening.
That's the same with parenting.
Without a doubt, we need to be cautious as parents. But we also need to truly know the reason for our fears and understand if they actually have ground to stand on. Is co-sleeping inherently dangerous? Is getting a vaccine before a certain age ensuring the kid to a weird third arm?
Whatever your fear is, name it. Then look at it. What's that fear built on? Internet warnings, firsthand experience, stories from friends?
Is it something that you should let rule your everyday actions, or can you take the right precautions to do what you can to prevent the bad from coming along?
Scary things are scary. But we can't let scary things be everything. Get to know the scary things. Understand them and clear the shroud of mystery and fear-based information so that you can see them clearly and really understand them.
Even though I know there are bears, I'm going to keep going outside.
Taking time for the quiet moments is transformative.
I've always been a morning person.
The morning is my safe place.
It's best spent outside, alone, with coffee, and a book.
I actually know who I am without these moments, and I don't really like him. I've had stints of time in my life that for whatever reason I needed to sleep in, couldn't drink coffee right away, wasn't interested in a book, and was stuck inside. Those were dark days.
All dramatization aside, these moments have always been important to me. It's the time of the day where I can reflect on yesterday, think about today, meditate, read, and be with my thoughts for just a little bit before the world crowds in. It's like having my own private chunk of the world that no one else is invited to or will ever discover.
When I worked outside, I would always wake up early. It didn't matter if I was up with a kid until midnight, I was up at five or six in the morning to build a fire, make coffee, and look out at the water before facing what was usually guaranteed to be a stressful day.
I traded hours of sleep for these moments, but the value they held for me was so immense that the trade felt like an easy one to make.
Now, I get up two hours before my partner and son do because I want the same thing. At first it was so I could work, but I quickly realized that work wasn't always what helped me be with my own thoughts. Now I meditate, read, write, and then eventually get to some work stuff depending on the morning fussiness level of little Zef.
These moments feel normal to me now. But they fit snugly into the bucket of "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone". And in a world that's paved paradise and put up a parking lot, sneaking away to find these moments feels more and more important to me.
I know that when I take the time for the quiet moments with myself, I become a better person, and therefore a better dad.
A quick gratitude letter to the outdoors.
Maybe it's cheesy, but fuck it.
All of my greatest accomplishments in life can be tied directly back to you.
I hope others can find the value in you that I find each and every time I spend time with you.
I'm forever grateful for the way you have treated me, even when it has been harshly, for the lessons that have come from spending time with you have made me into a better, more confident, more loving, parent.
And for that, I thank you.
See, it was quick. It's over now.
Go outside.
