One with Nature

Some of my fondest memories are of being outside and encountering a force of Nature. Either when climbing a mountain by overcoming Gravity, looking into the Flames of the bonfire we built at a scout gathering, or dancing in the heavy Rain at an Intim Torna Illegál concert, the opportunity is there to unite with Nature, and to accept the role you have as a Human that is just a part of the system. Nature is not supposed to bother you, it’s been the way it is for millennia; do you think your bitching under a roof will stop the rain? Our species has climbed to the top of the food chain and developed an arrogance that can only serve as detrimental to an individual’s life.
This arrogance can be summed up as: Others must care about me. It is not important who or what those Others are. It could be the Lego brick you stepped on last night, it could be the random guy in the red striped shirt at your gym who benches 5 kilos less than you and thus should feel ashamed, or it could be Nature. And as everyone who’s not Ted Mosby can tell you, trying to start the rain is a futile effort.
Does this mean that you’re powerless, and thus can only sit back and watch your life, as if it was a movie, through your own eyes? I argue that the conclusion might be an augmentation of this idea, one that will allow you to wield power over your life by accepting Nature, and, to continue the analogy, become the director of your movie. Directors are not omnipotent, not even close, but there are many things they can control, and the outcome of their work will reflect the amount of effort and intellect they dedicate to the parts they deem important. If their value system aligns well with the audience’s, you get your Inceptions and your The Dark Knight Riseses; if it doesn’t, you get Birdemic. Let’s take a look at the aspects of your life you can actually direct.

On a high level, your contributions to life are your actions and your attitude. Actions are physical, or at least require some movement. For example, writing is not a sport, but it certainly is an action. Your attitude is more abstract. At first glance, attitude is just a given mental state you find yourself in, serving as background music to your life, a wave to be surfed until it ends on its own accord.
When you feel like peeling potatoes, you will peel them like there’s no tomorrow. God help us if you accidentally cut yourself, though. You throw a tantrum and feel like life will never be the same. Even if you go back to your 40-kilogram bag of spuds, you will now handle them with anger. You cut deeper, taking not just the skin, but trying to hurt the fine specimen you’re holding, carrying out the vendetta for your injury. This is how your attitude alters your actions. It is evident because we, as a species, are emotionally driven. Our tendency to portray ourselves as rational actors at every opportunity we get only serves as evidence against itself. What needs to be pointed out for us is that the actions we take do in fact influence our emotions too.

I first encountered this phenomenon on the pseudo-scientific show Brainiac that was running on the Discovery Channel. The hypothesis was that your physical state isn’t subjugated to your mental state, and vice versa, but that they are both sides of the same coin. Your mental state influences your physiological state, sure, but you can also go the other way and move your body in certain ways to elicit a mental response. I found the test they did in the show brilliant. They hired the worst comedian they could find, sat an individual down in front of them [ thus making them even less likely to laugh; humans like to laugh in a social setting, hence laugh tracks on sitcoms exist ], and filmed the performance and the participant’s reaction as-is. People were generally uncomfortable and they didn’t find much joy in the experience. Then the researchers introduced a single object to ensure testing with an isolated variable. They put a pen in the person’s mouth horizontally, so their face had a forced smile, and the comedian got back on the stage. Some people started laughing as soon as the guy opened his mouth, while others made it until the first punchline, but everyone cracked up and enjoyed the humour pretty soon.

Change your body language, change your emotions!

This is very apparent when you’re outside, exploring Nature. Surrounded by beautiful trees, tasty cockroaches, and the danger of a bear lurking in the distance, you can’t help but feel alive. Being a scout, I did climb a few mountains here and there. Frequently, you need to go through a forest to even get a first glimpse at the mountain you want to climb. Here, the group has a chance to bond before the route gets challenging. The chirping of birds fills you with positive energy which you can use during the later parts.
The Székelykő is not such a peak. You can reach the foot of it by a 20-minute walk from the nearby village, Torockó, and you can see the peak itself from miles away. I climbed it with a group of friends at midnight.
The route was nothing like any I had experienced before. You arrive at the foot of the hill, look up, and see a steep path straight upwards [ if it wasn’t so dark at this hour ]. You start walking upwards, and after 10 minutes of stairmaster, you look up and feel like the peak is farther away than when viewing it from the village. This fight against Gravity proved to be one of the most challenging activities I’ve done. In the beginning, we chatted because we were having fun. In the middle part, I shut my mouth and just focused on staying alive. During the later stages, I had to start chatting again, otherwise I would’ve lost my mind.

So many thoughts rush through your head when you’re getting close to your physical limits. Every mean thing you said in kindergarten, every time you stuck your gum on the underside of a table, every racist joke you told in your life somehow gets spat out of your memory bank, as if to justify your current suffering. But you keep going, you put your foot on the next stone, you push with your arm on your knee, and muster up the energy to shift your weight forward and complete the step. And to take the step after, you need to battle all the same voices in your head, yet again. You barely won the last time, what chance do you have now, having been worn out even more? But in the moment you think you’re done, when you accept your suffering, you see yourself taking another step. And another. You’re like, Holy shit, I’m still moving, what is happening? I thought that was all my power plus a loan from next year. Your brain has run out of shitty stuff to throw at you and finds something a lot more powerful to help you. This something comes from the heart. It’s the desire to stand proud in your own eyes. You hold onto a good memory and keep replaying it over and over and over, making each step you take feel easier and easier. And when you get to the top, look down, and shed a tear. In that moment, you are invincible.

My years in the scouts taught me something interesting about Fire as well: it brings people together. It is the ultimate mood lighting. We used to light campfires every night, played games around them, had thematic presentations by the individual patrols, sang together, and, inevitably, had some good laughs.
The scout bonfire starts with the entire camp sitting down around the fire pit; when everyone is ready, we start chanting, which is the sign to light the fire. You welcome the first flames. You stare at them as they get passed from paper to branch, from branch to log. You hear the sizzles of boiling water and the crackle of a dry log, and you wonder and ponder. At the start, we play some children’s games, like My Little Pony, to get energized and to bring our moods up, and then eventually present our own piece of the story.
Sometime during the first presentation, the campfire falls over or the flames grow so big that the people around have to back off a few meters, and everyone’s spirits are elevated by laughing at ourselves. We’re safe, we survived! This is bonding. You’re sitting there, watching others enact a fancy tale, as it gets darker and colder, and you reduce your whole world to that circle of people who sit in just the perfect position relative to the fire where the temperature is perfectly balanced. And the focal point of it all is the fire, that draws your attention more and more as time passes.

The moment the matchstick lit up the wood, it also lit up your curiosity, and just like the firewood, you start to get consumed by the flames. You see yourself in the fire, dancing around, moving gracefully, eternally struggling to reach the Heavens, but ultimately doomed to end up in the ground. You then become the fire. And just as the fire in the pit spreads across every piece of wood it can reach, you light each other up too, your souls joining together for a dance above the campfire. The fire in your souls will last through the night though, and shine brighter in the morning.

The story about Rain happened in the magical city of Tusnádfürdő, which Google translates as Baths with a shower. Tusványos 2017, my first festival ever. I went with a friend whose social skills I always envied. He has this special ability to draw you into his world by telling and emoting stories, then cracking a well-timed joke just when the tension has risen high enough. We met with two girls at the train station who were also there for the festival, sat with them on the train, hyped each other up, then hung out later as well. Not before pitching our tent in the storm though.
See, the skies were clear when we started the trek to the festival grounds in the afternoon, but as we got closer to the site, it started raining, then heavier and heavier. When we arrived at the camp, we had only minutes to set up our tent so that at least our bags would stay somewhat dry. We battled with the spine of the contraption, because who has time to read instructions in an emergency, then the wind blew the sheets into the tree next to us, but we managed to secure everything just in time, and the concert we went to see in the first place had only just started by then, so all seemed good enough.
We arrived at the stage just after the band played their first song, and merged into the crowd on the side to start vibing. A couple of songs later, the inevitable rain came down with all the might Nature can harness. We quickly found shelter under a nearby beer tent, along with the part of the crowd that was (un?)lucky enough to fit inside. The rain hammered harder and harder, even suppressing the voice of the singer. Another song passed like that, my friend and I looked each other in the eye and had a telepathic conversation. Is this what we’ve been waiting for weeks? Wanna go out there? And we did! And I’m glad that we did.

First, the cold water shocks you as your hair gets wet in about 4 milliseconds. Then it gets into your eye, which is uncomfortable. Your shirt gets soaked and starts sticking to your shoulders. The moment you feel that single, ominous drop of water draw a cold line on your spine, down your lower back, you get forced out of your head. Instead of thinking about your finances or an angry comment someone made on Facebook, you inhabit your body. Your senses get amplified. The sounds you are hearing are not filtered through the psychological baggage you’re carrying anymore, they are instead acted out by your body instantly. You move together with the music. You become best friends with the melody. You live the lyrics in real-time. You become present.

So, step out into the rain and dance!