Outside

“And so the strange experience can arise that in the morning you have left the walls around the bed behind you, that you feel the wind playing on your cheeks and find yourself standing at the center of the world: this is my home all day, here I will live while walking.”

There I walk: the rain streaming down my glasses and cheeks, wondering why my 'home' leaks so much.

I pull the hood of my rain jacket further over my head to somewhat protect my lenses and get a sense of the route. My searching gaze is not 10 meters ahead of me, as it should be, but looking down at where I will place my next footstep. The view is blurry from all the moisture. My ears are filled with the rustling of the plastic of the jacket around my head, the strong wind, and the clattering of raindrops, which, through the microphone technology of my hearing aid, comes crashing into my brain like a thundering waterfall. No filter, no dampening.

And then, keeping my phone as dry as possible with my wet and clammy hands, bent over to shield it from the rain, trying to see where the route goes and whether I am still following the planned path.

Any kind of rain, hard or soft, shrinks my world down to just the immediate vicinity of my being. There is little 'zen' in that. And when the storm hits me, I really feel like the center of the world. In other words, under these conditions, my experience of the world is limited to my body at the spot where I place my next step. The ultimate sensation of being the 'center of the universe'.

What's fun about this? Well, I’m going to spill it right away—everything! If I were sitting in the shelter and warmth of home, I wouldn't have experienced this.

I wouldn't have felt what it's like to work with the elements, not felt that wind and water torment and penetrate every crack and seam, making your skin shiver, impairing your sight and hearing. It makes me small, small to the core of who I am.

The climax comes when the sky opens up, the clouds part, the rain stops, the wind calms, and the sun makes itself known and felt. Then my sight and mind are clear, washed clean, momentarily stripped of my ego, and the world reveals itself in all its beauty. To experience this connects me more with nature, with myself as a human – I don’t want to miss this – time and time again.

Outside