Day one on a camping trip you make effort to replicate your daily life at the campground. You set up your tent and bed for ultimate comfort. You organize your food and set up your station to to be able to do your coffee and collagen routine in the morning. Your cooler is stocked. You brush your teeth twice a day and wash your face before bed. Day one you are ready to kill it at camping. It always starts this way.
Day two you start to settle in a bit more. You realize you probably didn't need all the day to day products and gadgets and necessities you brought to help you feel comfortable. You start to relax in between "doing things". 24-hours without any way to charge your phone and no wi-fi or cell reception start to render your phone, an object you carry with you almost all the time, fairly useless. You may even forget where you put it from time to time. The hours spent making simple meals, preparing for various activities, daily camping rhythms, in addition to the all glorious camp chair sitting starts to settle into your system and feel really dang good. The way in which you do use your nary charged phone is to engage in creative endeavors; to take a photo, listen to music, voice note yourself a sitcom idea, or use your notes app to jot down a poem that came to you.
Somewhere past day three, you stop having thoughts about what is on the news, how much gas costs, or about things like tracking your meals and adding your weight to your fitness app. You are too busy walking to the beach, riding bikes around the campgrounds, throwing the Frisbee, or getting lost in a good book while laying in a sun soaked hammock. You sit around the fire for hours in the morning reheating your textured percolator coffee like its the most decadent cup you've ever had. That's because it is.
You stop worrying about your noisy camp neighbors whose kids wake up and shriek with excitement at 5:45 am every morning ruining your desired eight hours of sleep. You lay in your tent and embrace the joy you hear in their voices and consider that the reason you haven't been able to sleep in in years may be your own inner child wanting to wake up and feel that much delight. You write down your thoughts, and because your phone is now officially dead, you do it with pen and paper.
You've lost the guilt about not doing the routines you have that make you feel connected and grounded. You no longer need to sit in quiet each morning with your lemon water, and greens drink and collagenated coffee to practice meditation and breath work and write. You are living the meditation. You are living the creative practice. You are breathing deeply and feeling oxygenated by your pure existence. You can drop the guides and routines that you usually need to support getting there because you are there. Perfectly relaxed and present. And all it took was to step out of your pre-programmed daily life. This is living and this is life.
And as your time comes to a close, you promise yourself you'll remember what it feels like to not need your phone "for an emergency" at every moment and let yourself be guided by finding joy in the simple yet profound daily lives we all live. You'll keep your promise for awhile. You will try really hard to keep it as long as long as you can. And then day by day you'll start to go back to whatever normal looked like for you. It's to be expected given the societal and social cues that somehow push you to appear busy, important, engaged, happy and hyper connected to what everyone else is doing through our phones.
You will conform to the routines of work and school and housework. You will not even notice when you start to sweep your floors without thinking of what adventure that created that dirt for which you clean. See, when you sweep your tent while camping, you almost always smile at the thought of the the adventure for which the mess came from. The walk you took with your daughter to the camp store on the longer and messier "fairy" path to pick up firewood and big league gum to blow bubbles the size of your head with.
To sit around the fire. To clean the dirt from the best adventures. To see the stars in their raw, dark sky state. To tattoo the memories of every second in your mind. To create the space for your ideas, words and creativity to live and breathe. These and more are all the reasons I camp. To allow the magic of the stardust we are made of to be remembered in every cell. And yes, I always come back to my daily life (I am writing this while drinking my green juice, after all) but I know I always can, and will, go back for more.