I Believe in Experience

I believe that everyone should take time to experience your experiences. A moment lost is a moment gone forever.

I led a course over the summer that brought eight high school students from New York City to Colorado for a twelve-day wilderness experience. I felt extremely fortunate to have been given the opportunity to fulfill my vision of facilitating connections between people and this place that I have developed a deep connection with.

The theme for these 12 days came to be “experience the experience”. The students had never been in a mountain town let alone on a backpacking trip in a Wilderness Area. Every aspect of this course introduced something new, something not to be missed.

This trip also came at a very busy time in my life; I was in school, and working full time while juggling the other responsibilities in my life. I was looking forward to the clarity and peace a wilderness trip brings. My personal goal for this time was to take-in everything that surrounded me and reconnect to the internal balance that had been overlooked for the past few months.

As our group hiked, camped and explored together I made sure to point out all of the little things that, combined create this amazing place: the wildflowers blooming in the high alpine meadows, the alpine glow that moved up the mountain sides as darkness crept in, the sound of the creek that was the lifeline for this entire ecosystem as well as our group for these 12 days. Reminding the students and myself to stop every once in a while to “experience the experience”.

At the end of the trip the students were asked to write what wilderness meant to them and how their views had changed from the time they arrived here to now. their responses ranged from, “I now know who the wild is and where and how and what the wind whispers” to “Nature to me is not a place to depend on but a place to live in balance”. I was pleasantly surprised to find that through our time experiencing the wilderness that all of the students in the course began to develop their own relationship with this pristine place and found connections to each other that would last much longer than just the plane ride home.

What I realized is that connections come through experience so the best way for me to fulfill my vision is by seizing every opportunity to take the time and truly experience all of life’s experiences.