The Exhilaration and Emptiness of Novelty

Now that I've got a fairly substantial commute every workday, I've been taking full advantage of "reading" books on tape/cd (or as I often verbally slip: cd's on tape) on the 1 hr+ ride to and from work. I've almost completed my second book by John Krakauer, Into the Wild, (the first being Into Thin Air) and it doesn't take a genius to gather that these two books are somewhat related. They are both retelling of outdoor adventures/dangers, one from the first person perspective (Into Thin Air), the other (Into the Wild) written after a great deal of research with family members, eyewitnesses, acquaintances and journal entries. Incidentally, I also saw the fairly recently released movie by Sean Penn based on the latter book, which is worth renting, in my opinion. Much more background for the story and the kid's reasoning for what he did is contained in the book, though, so I recommend that even more so than the movie.

Anyway, for those who've neither seen the movie nor read the book, the basic premise of Into the Wild is that a rich kid (McCandless) decides to buck the system and go live (and die) in the wilderness in Alaska. Obviously the book goes much deeper than what would seem possible given my terse summary, but the basic concept is as stated above.

One topic that Krakauer goes into quite deeply, because it is part of the philosophy/outlook that Krakauer shares with the kid (McCandless), is the concept that some people are wired to crave/need a certain amount of danger/novelty/uncertainty in their daily lives. And that some people are of the opinion that life simply isn't worth living if you're doing the same thing, day in and day out. This yearning for constant newness in McCandless was strengthened by, if not a direct result from, the fact that he was heavily influenced by "outdoorsy" writers (Jack London, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, et al) and absorbed their material relentlessly as a young man in high school and college. This material thoroughly convinced this very intelligent young man that being idealistic, and living exactly as your ideal prescribed, is achievable, and should be done as much as possible. Part of that ideal was to never be tied down to anything, to go where the spirit moved him.

This is most certainly a sentiment I had periodically shared with McCandless, mostly when I was in my late teens/early 20s. I guess you could say I've "gotten over it" now, but it's still something I can relate to. But my current stance regarding the notion that life should be a totally new adventure, every single day, is that, while it is quite romantic (it just plain sounds good), based on my limited experience with being a "free" man in my younger days, going to new places and seeing new faces was quite exhiliarating when I was in the new place, meeting the new face. But when I was out of the immediate novelty of the scenario, I was left with a distinct emotional void, a palpable restlessness that somehow seemed less bearable than the monotony of boredom or daily obligation. This seems to be immediately cured, as one would assume, by the novelty of the next crazy or unpredictable thing I could do...or even the prospect of what the adventure the next day might have in store. Which turned the joy of novelty into more of a high from a drug, rather than true joy. I was only happy when I was on the adventure, and any time not spent adventuring turned into torture. My emotions peaked and troughed distinctly, with little to no time spent in being simply "content".

Many adventurers would confuse contentedness with malaise or laziness, but the content feeling I certainly longed for ten or so years back was not the meloncholy that many people assume accompanies "settling down", but it was rather a supportive comfort to dampen the wildly fluctuating emotional inertia of the highs and lows of New vs. Nothing. Maybe I'm just ill-equipped to get what doing new things every day really means, but my inclination would be to assume that, at some point, New!New!New! everyday, has to get old, somehow, eventually. But I'm also assuming, at this point, that I will never know if it gets old...and I'm okay with that...which gets to the point of this post:

I've found comfort...in starting my life with a new family of my own. Seeing my kids change and learn so incredibly fast does have a certain newness to it everyday, but if you'd ask any adventurer, he'd say I'm doing the same old thing everyday...going to work and seeing my family. Where the adventurer is convinced that's he's learning exponentially more about life than I, because he sees and experiences many more people, places, and scenarios; I'm convinced that a person with a stable structure to his/her life learns not just cursory knowledge about many things, but the uncountable and interconnected details of every aspect of the life he thinks he knows quite well, only to be completely flabbergasted by some previously ignored, presumably mundane detail of something he sees a thousand times day. And that flabbergastation (where you go to get flabber-gas) is exceedingly more valuable and more educational than any superficial knowledge you could acquire wandering the hills of some foreign country.

Does that imply that I don't ever want to wander the hills of some foreign country? Of course not. I know we weren't meant to be confined to cubicles our whole lives, and I want to see and experience as much of God's creation as I can similar to so many people of my generation, but I'm not going get all bent out of shape because I haven't seen much of our physical planet just yet. If the opportunity presents itself, I'll jump on it, but I have a feeling that circumstances will prohibit extensive world travel for quite a while, maybe until one or more of our kids are old enough to be my/our traveling companions. Until then, I'll continue to be amazed at all of the little things right underneath my nose.