Free to Just Be

Watch young children at play sometime. Really watch them. If you do, you’ll notice something remarkable. They don’t think about the future or the past. They don’t think about the way their behaviour might appear to others. They are completely and utterly lost in the moment. They are fully immersed in what they are feeling and doing. 

That way of being in the world doesn’t last, unfortunately. Children learn quickly that they need to mask what they truly feel and who they truly are in order to get their basic needs met. They ask themselves constantly, ‘Who do I have to be, and how do I need to act so that people will take care of me?’ They soon discover that this mask is not one they can ever really take off and put down either. It is one that they will need to wear and hide behind for the rest of their lives.

‘That is the price we pay for civilization’, said Freud.

But the price can be a heavy one. Which is why, I think, we experience such relief when we head into the outdoors. We go there as if by instinct to be reminded of what it looks like to simply be in the world without condition. Everything there is essentially whole and complete in whatever state it exists; nothing there needs to be anything other than what it is.

I think it’s that rested simplicity that we love so much about the outdoors.

I think that’s what we covet so much for ourselves.

BlogAdrian Juric