On adventures
I recently went and saw the movie Into the Wild. It isn't shocking how your opinions of things change depending on where you are in your life, but it does always seem to be a bit funny to me.
When I read the book in high school, Chris McCandless' story was an inspiration. I had also just read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The River Why. These books painted romantic pictures of cross country travels and the perils of a technological world. They were about finding what was good in life, finding what was "real". And believe you me, I ate it up.
In high school I frequently entertained fantasies of living in the woods and escaping society. I planned the books I would write afterwards. And developed perfect analogies to explain my motives (Did you know that you can boil a frog alive if you put him in a pot of water and slowly raise the temperature but that if you put him in a pot of boiling water, he'll just jump out?).
However, watching the movie this time, I was mostly impressed with how careless Chris was.
Jon Krakauer puts it best in his Death of an Innocent (Which the book Into the Wild is based on),
At the time, death was a concept I understood only in the abstract. I didn't yet appreciate its terrible finality or the havoc it could wreak on those who'd entrusted the deceased with their hearts.
That last clause is the one that really hit home. How can you be careless when there are people out there in the world that care about you. Well, I guess it would be easy if you don't care about them.
Or maybe that is just an excuse I use when that feeling builds up in my stomach every time I think about doing something reckless. It is a scapegoat for my cowardice.
Bilbo said this of adventures:
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Maybe I just think too much. But adventures like those in books seem very hard to come by and daunting to initiate. That and I am terrified of large bodies of water (or small, really) and am kind of scared of the dark.
3 December 2007 03:16pm UTC • 462 views • 0 comments
Tagged with painfulposts, adventure, intothewild
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