At Sugar Lake those ten minutes of “being” opened my eyes up to what I have been missing for such a long time, My mind drifted away from the chaos that had been rushing through my head, The stress of being in college and having so much work to do was starting to burden me. I was constantly worrying that with all this work that I am going to eventually break down, but as the ten minutes proceeded my mind started to wonder elsewhere.
I had noticed these two Vibrantly orange dragon flies perching on the wood surrounding the dock, staring out upon the water as if they were doing the assignment with us That is what made me wonder, what it was like to have no worries in the world other than the basic survival ones. The crickets chiming in the background gave me that ”white sound” that enabled me to think clearly The smell of the lake water also provoked these thoughts, that if dragon flies could go about all day just flying and landing on whatever they classified as “stable ground” with only the worries of frogs and animals attacking them, why can’t humans be like that?
Instead we have the pressure of going to college which puts us in debt for decades and doing exceptionally welljust to get a decent job and also the stress of having a family and living the ”American Dream’s If today’s society was not so demanding the average day would not be as overwhelming, but most people are under the pressure of fitting a hundred different activities into one day, These sights and smells that sung in my head and lungs brought me back to Earth in a way that no other environment could have provided.
This entire circumstance became so meaningful to me, It had been such a long time since I had deeply contemplated about life in such a way as I did at Sugar Lake This ten minutes gave me time to just forget about all the worries that were running through my mind and allowed me to concentrate on my surroundings. It felt great to enjoy nature without the distraction of my cell phone, music, or just simply people talking around me. The calmness of the lake added to this surreal experience I had been to lakes several times this month but there were always crowded beaches and pontoon boats chopping up the water and creating noise, Not having these distractions created the ideal situation to enable effortless thinking and that is exactly what happened.
The only other times that “being” has naturally happened in the my life is when I was lost in nature. When times were rough and overwhelmingI would go out to the woods in my back yard and find a mossy patch under some pine trees that was well light, This section would enable me to watch the native animals scurry about in their daily routines and allow me to just embrace the sound of nature. As Louv has been referring to in his book, nature really does have healing properties It has helped me through so many stressful times in my life that if I did not have this I would have probably ended up in mentally unstable during those hard times. Instead I was able to get through them by just simply embracing nature and allowing myself to “be”. To be “being” is having a clear mind and letting the stress dissipate Out by the Sugar Lake water I became one with the grass, one with the water, and one with the tress. There was no distance between them and myself. No internal thoughts were overrunning my head. I was taking in my surroundings just like a tree takes in carbon dioxide. My current worries like school and all the work that I had left undone before the trip were no longer travelling through my mind.
My mind was essentially blank and that is how it is supposed to be when one is “being”, To “do” is another story, Doing requires more work than being. Being requires concentration but doing does as well. To “do” is what society requires of us in today’s world. We have to do as much as possible to compete with the next person, and ifthey have one more activity that we do, we are essentially thrown out of the possibility for the position. Doing involves the mind being occupied as well as the hands, but doing is more or less the opposite of being, Even though being involves minute brain activity but more control than doing does, one can become exhausted from being and doing. They just are not from the same actions. Today more people are “doing” than “being” and that is why most of them are overwhelmed and depressed. If we could take just ten minutes a day Like at Sugar Lake to “be” life could seem so much more simple. Instead we put ourselves through the agony of trying to become the perfect person which is unable to be achieved. Every person is going to have their own version of how to “be” but they are all going to involve looking at the world through the eyes that most of society does not anymore.
My Experience of Being While at Sugar Lake. (2022, Jul 17). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/my-experience-of-being-while-at-sugar-lake/