Wordsworth an adrenaline junkie?

So I’ve been on a Wordsworth kick lately in my (scarce) spare time when I decide to read rather than throw in another workout. Tonight while reading through “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” I was struck by a significant parallel to my own experience in the outdoors, the natural world, and its ability to heal us when we’ve been cut deep.

I remember running around Chino hills as a boy. Often, between whatever legal or illegal (mostly the latter) activities my friends and I were carrying out, I would find myself reflecting on the mystery of this little “urban backcountry,” and felt probably something like one of Wordsworth’s other poetic creations- the pedlar. To him “Even the loose stones that cover the highway,/ he gave moral life, he saw them feel,/ Or linked them to some feeling.” Man, Mr. Wordsworth, you might be dead, rotted and hollowed to oblivion by maggots, but you had your finger on the pulse of some ubiquitous youthful sentiments! What’s a freakin’ downer about Chino Hills is that its ability to inspire wonder and youthful optimism in me is not commensurate to my growing mental capacity…basically it’s now just a big dirt oval beset by white-collar, republican strongholds of cities. No longer does it help me escape my own self-doubt. It no longer has the effect Wordsworth speaks of when traversing alpine slopes amidst streams and boulders “Flying from something he dreads [more] than one/ who sought the thing he loved.”

So now to my first point I rambled away from. How in the hell am I going to capture this sense of wonder again? Well, my recent backpacking trip showed me…only by finding bigger, greater, and inherently more dangerous “playgrounds.” I’m thinking tomorrow it might be Sequoia National Park…but by my mid-life crisis it might be the freakin’ Himalayas! This is potentially a bad thing; at least for my toes and fingers. It seems that now I am at the crossroads of becoming an adrenaline junkie or couch potato, but is there a middle ground? To me I really understand what the hell he meant when he spoke of his second outing to Tintern Abbey being somewhat of a downer compared to the visions that kept him going during his bleak sojourns in the cities.

I’m starting to understand this Adrenaline Junkie moniker, but at the same time I wonder if it is really the challenge of something bigger. Challenge, to me, implies that there is something to be beat or conquered, yet you can’t do that to this sublime awesomeness (I’m sure Wordsworth, Shelley and other romantics would agree with me) of Nature. To me it’s not about getting to the top so much as being at the mountain or the National Park and away from society, responsibilities, etc. Being outdoors is about good companionship. It’s about NOT forgetting our troubles, but readjusting our focus on our strengths so that we can acknowledge our faults and failures in stride. It’s about sharing the outdoors, and in that frame of mind my sense of optimism and self-worth get a good swift kick in the ass. They are rekindled and awake again for at least sometime after any trip, just like Wordsworth after realizing that his sister was feeling those same emotions he felt when he first saw the ruins of Tintern Abbey, even though it was no longer as potent for him on the second outing.

We need to immerse ourselves in these sublime playgrounds and respect their ability to kill us if we screw up or act too brashly. Being out there makes me feel like a lowly pedlar and levels the playing field. Everyone is equally helpless out there. Avalanches and altitude don’t commute their consequences for CEO’s, and don’t seek out revenge or even merited retribution on those who’ve done us ill. It’s all equally unstable and unpredictable. Pretty sweet huh?

So then I’m not an adrenaline junkie. Just a man trying to cope with my life and remind myself to move in another’s perspective if I can; to exercise that oft atrophied muscle of empathy. To make my “Memory be as a dwelling-place/ For all sweet sounds and harmonies […]/ If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief/ Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts/ Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,/ And these my exhortations!” We need to get others out too, and share our stories and our experiences since that’s all we have to hold as truth…not beauty (sorry Mr. Keats). It reminds me of another set of lines in “The Five-Book Prelude” when Wordsworth laments “Meanwhile old Grandam Earth is grieved to find/ The playthings which her love designed for him/ Unthought of […] Now this is hollow, ‘tis a life of lies.”
Get off the couch, your chair, this blog. Go for a walk somewhere without concrete even if it’s a sandbox.