LEAVE THE DISTRACTIONS BEHIND

by Christine Reed

Boredom can feel antsy or anxious, irritating or frustrating. It’s an uncomfortable space to be. It’s the feeling that arises when you are unoccupied or uninterested in what’s happening around you. As children, we experience boredom when we’re riding in the car and grocery shopping with our mom and done with our math work before others in the class. It’s a state of discontent that comes on quickly and fills our heads with a buzzing drone. The inner sound of nothing. When the mind is not saying “look at this” and “have feelings about that, ” what does it say?

As adults, we often turn to screens to rescue ourselves from impending boredom. Sitting in the doctor’s office, we scroll through social media. While standing in line at the grocery store, we refresh our emails. After work, we flip on the television and plant ourselves in front of it or play video games late into the night. If screens don’t offer enough protection from boredom, we turn to shopping, alcohol, drugs—anything for a quick release of feel-good chemicals and a fuzzy sheen over the idea of self. We would rather be distracted by the external than dive within our minds.

From boredom—we can choose two routes, looking without OR looking within.

Every time I step on the trail, I find it easier to do both. Nature is my gateway to a view of something bigger than myself. The mountains, which were here before time itself. The trees, who have known many lifetimes. The rivers and lakes and their families of fish do not know me, but I visit to understand them—to know anything other than myself. I study the pink and purple of the wildflowers and the patterns of the clouds.

Christine does not exist out there. I become only a pair of eyes, ears, a nose with which to sense the world. If for only a moment—I become small enough to disappear.

In between those moments, nature gives me access to my most profound knowing of self.

It becomes a reflection of my inner world, and I start to see myself everywhere I look. To walk quietly through an unknown place is to let the silence in. Without the screens and books and podcasts and dopamine hits—I must derive experience from within. There is nothing left to tamp down my insecurities and fears and grief and pain.

On the trail is where I face myself most fully, experience my physicality with the most awareness, and think my most creatively. I must unpack the things I’ve kept hidden. For the mind to process or to create, it must wander. And the mind wanders with the feet. In Deep Work, Cal Newport explains a type of “professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. ” He describes the feeling of boredom that may arise in this distraction-free zone and how it often comes before a breakthrough.

I firmly believe that the idea of Deep Work can be applied not only to professional and creative pursuits—but to personal work as well. Processing trauma and grief is not surface. Becoming a stronger person and rooting out the source of your stories cannot be done while multi-tasking. Time must be set aside to do the work of inner exploration. Discomfort and resistance in the form of boredom will meet you along the way.

The trail is a trusty key through which I unlock the door to myself. When I think about the beautiful places I have hiked, I think of who I was at that time, but more importantly, how the lack of distraction and the presence of deep work fueled progress or growth. The trails that come most easily to mind are those on which my deepest work has been done.

Indeed, there were times on those trails that I was bored. Boredom is the threshold through which I must pass. To gain access to the place where creative thought, ideas, and physical awareness bring me closer to my truth. I do not linger long there anymore—for I know what lies beyond. And one does not do well to linger in the in between space.

Christine Reed is an avid amateur outdoors woman. Her upbringing as a military brat taught her to see everywhere and nowhere as home. She didn't start hiking until after college, when she realized she wasn't sure where her life was headed and sought out a defined path on the Appalachian Trail. Her backpacking memoir, Alone in Wonderland is a story about backpacking the Wonderland Trail around Mt Rainier. But it's also a story about defining who we are in the world and challenging ideas about who we should be.

Check out Alone in Wonderland at www.aloneinwonderland.com.

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