Getting Away
By Volodymyrr
Kish
These past six months have been busy for me
on all fronts – personal, career and organizational, and as much as I like to
think of myself as a resilient and hardy individual, I was beginning to see the
effects of the inevitable cumulative stress that was the end result of it
all. I don’t think that evolution
prepared us homo sapiens for the kind of busy, demanding and
ever-changing life that we face in the Twenty First Century.
For most of Mankind’s
existence, life was relatively simple for the vast majority of people. Daily life was pretty much a set of
repetitive routines centred on basic survival.
True, every now and then there were occasional moments of danger and
panic caused by either nature or the rapaciousness of our fellow man, but these
were comparatively infrequent. People by
and large led fairly non-stressful albeit boring and predetermined lives.
A primary reason for this
was that most people did not have to contend with choice or having to make
decisions of any consequence. Life was
pretty well determined for you from birth, depending on where you were born and
where you fit into the pecking order of the society you lived in. You did what was expected or what you were
told, and didn’t need to stress yourself out about choosing a career, getting
ahead, competing for promotions, the state of your pension plan, current
political trends, the rate of inflation or keeping up with the
“Joneseviches”. You had no control over
any of these things. The whole concept
of having any say in or control of your life or destiny was a completely
foreign and incomprehensible concept to our ancestors.
Of course, there were
always those rare individuals who questioned the accepted state of things and
who undoubtedly did get “stressed” by it, but they seldom lived long enough to
develop ulcers – in those days hanging or being burnt at the stake was the
usual fate of such independent thinkers.
But I am digressing a
little too much from where I started.
Feeling a tad burnt out of late, I escaped for most of the week for a
personal and private retreat. The
dictionary defines “retreat” as a withdrawing or retirement for religious
exercises or meditation. It was partly
that and a whole lot of “escape” thrown in – escape from my normal environment
and daily routines. I went (by myself)
to the family cottage which is located just south of
Cottage season hasn’t
really started yet, so for most of the time I had the lake
mostly to myself. No people, no music,
no traffic, no motor boats, no sounds of civilization whatsoever. What I heard was the chirping of the birds,
the quacks of passing ducks, the lapping of the waves hitting the shore and the
wind whooshing through the trees. I took
the canoe out for long paddles out on the lake and marvelled at the peace and
tranquillity that is the natural state of the wilderness in the absence of man. I took long hikes on the wonderful trails in
An escape it was
indeed! For four glorious days I put all
thoughts of business, organizational obligations, family demands, chores,
practical worries and all thoughts of making the world a better place out of
mind. No doubt it was to some degree
self-indulgent, yet to me it is a form of meditation, a way to purge my mind of
all those things that lead to stress and to try and just sense, feel and
appreciate nature and God’s wonders. In
as much as the body can be wounded and afflicted, the same is true for the
spirit or soul, and from time to time, you have to dedicate a little time to
let it heal a bit from the ravages of life. From experience, I have learned
that this is best done not in the midst of man’s creation, but God’s.
And so I have now returned
to my normal world, not necessarily with any great new found wisdom from my
meditations, but definitely a little more spiritually refreshed and at peace
with myself.