We often think of an adventure or a long road expedition as something that will only drain us. We think colossal amounts of energy, exertion, and intellectual effort is required if we’re to head on an experience of a lifetime. No matter if you’re hiking through a wonderful national park, you’re cycling from coast to coast over a matter of months, or you’re going on a great food tour, the idea itself can make us yawn.
But in actual fact, adventure can ‘reset’ you in more ways than one. Finding this out can feel like striking gold for the first time. When you plan a great milestone of an adventure, as guided by the many articles on this national parks blog, you will find something to happen to you.
Instead of looking at your future experience as something that will take from you, you regard it as something nourishing, and rejuvenating. Sometimes it’s not the hibernation period we need to feel the most comforted. It’s getting out of our standard barriers and once again adapting to a renewed manner of looking at life.
Appreciating Nature
When we spend time in our inner-city environments, we can often become nulled to the progression of nature after some time. We forget that the wilderness is still the majority of the land mass on this planet, and it has its own, slower pace of life.
Appreciating nature, the stock default of what humans lived intimately within for thousands of years, is one of the healthiest things you can do for your spirit. It can also help you shed your stress deeply. Walking around one of the most beautiful national parks for waterfalls, for example, can grant you this beautiful appreciation of nature, helping you experience that which really matter, and that’s the world around us.
Considering natural history, the excellent preservation efforts of the park rangers and designers and simply spending time there without the need for intellectual engagement can be a true adventure, and can help you experience something you may never have before – exploration.
Repel The Comfort Zone
We can too-often find ourselves too attached to our modern comforts. An adventure can often help you get outside of that, or find at least an alternate means of living well. For example, it could be that purchasing a small travel trailer that helps you with your needs and gives you comfort could help unlock a huge road trip opportunity for you and your friends. This can help you travel with optimism, while also getting outside of your comfort zone.
It’s not hard to see how getting outside of your comfort zone is important. Too often we can feel connected to high-quality hotels or the need for WiFi in every area of our lives. But that’s not how the great outdoors works.
There’s a cliche that suggests ‘there’s no WiFi in the forest, but you will find a better connection.’ It sounds like a somewhat cringeworthy epithet to suggest, but it’s absolutely true, through and through.
Taking some time to dispel from the hyper-connectivity of the modern world and instead once again see life through your human lens can be tremendously freeing, and conducive to your personal health. But you have to try to ever know that’s the case.
A New Mindset
When it’s just you and your adventure at hand, you don’t have to worry about that issue you might be experiencing at work. You don’t worry about how well your outfit goes together. You don’t care about the latest outrage happening on Twitter.
Instead, you feel comfortable in yourself, and are more willing to see the environment for all its worth. An adventure can actually help you come back to those problems you might have experienced before with a little more courage and patience, because you’ve had time to categorize them as they should be categorized, rather than thinking every minute problem is the fall of the world.
Shifting What’s Possible
Heading on an adventure needn’t feel limited to that we usually associate with ‘a vacation.’ Learning more about a national park is something that can be experienced by everyone, and so it has a very human ethos behind it.
We often think of taking an adventure by ‘the tourist route’ we might commit to. What hotels will we stay in? What landmarks will we visit? But really, an adventure can be so much more than this. We needn’t simply head for the most formulaic and obvious possibilities on our path to enjoy something worthwhile.
This is why shifting what’s possible is always a good idea, and why it can reset your normal approach. Perhaps you wish to walk a European pilgrimage route in order to get to a destination with care and attention, meeting people along the way.
Perhaps you wish to get involved with a community project. Or, perhaps you just want to take some time from work and volunteer for a beautiful restoration project that needs hands above all else.
Shift what’s possible in your mindset, and then the adventure you attend is sure to reset you, and help you awaken to your personal possibility. Almost no one could argue that this would have little value.
Gratitude
It’s often easy to feel a lack of gratitude when heading on a normal vacation. You’ve paid for this vacation, you’ve taken time from your working life to head abroad, and you know that you want to experience something worthwhile through that lens.
This can make you forget that actually, you should be grateful to experience that also. Heading into nature can help you feel that. Getting involved with a project can. Traveling a long distance and meeting new people can soften you.
And, as you get further on and on, it’s amazing to see how this attitude will only inform your spirit, again and again, and for the better. With that, your adventure will have been completely worthwhile.
With these tips, you are certain to allow your adventure to reset you for the better.