Deep Questions in Dark Forest.

There I was, sitting alone on a fold out chair with my dog Banks by my side. I was sipping on a fresh cup of coffee I had just brewed over the fire. The still and calm that morning was something very new. The air was crisp, it was early October and the weather was perfect for camping. The fire was just starting to build up some steam and I could feel the heat on my legs through my jeans. There were only a few noises that caught my attention. One was my dog, snoring loudly next to the tent. He had spent the entire night rummaging around in the woods looking for who knows what. He would breathe in deep, hold it for a second and it would whistle as it came out his nose. It reminded me of the cartoons I watched as a kid. I noticed the sounds of the birds in the trees and the small animals moving near me through the leaves. I could feel and hear my breath going in and out. I could feel my heart beating slowly as I raised the cup up to my lips. I sat there, quietly enjoying the silence. For the first time in a long time there was nothing that I needed to do. Before this trip I was searching for something that I didn’t know how to ask for. I spent a lot of time searching for “it” through different avenues that all ended up in the same place, nowhere. The only way I figured I could find it was to be alone, to remove the noise and focus on the issue, the only continuous stimulus in each situation, me. So this is exactly what I did.

I left my house in the early afternoon and drove about an hour to the Land between the lakes, a section of land in the middle of two man made lakes in western Kentucky. I planned this trip out as more of a forced come to Jesus meeting with myself than a vacation. In order to get the most out of it I knew I needed to be alone, really alone. I left my phone in the car, hiked long enough that I wasn’t able to comfortably escape to my car in the middle of the night and set up camp.

Now for most of us the thought of camping alone is nothing short of bonkers. To tell you the truth I thought it was too. I was not sure that leaving my phone behind was a good idea but I wanted to feel what it was like to be totally alone. Totally removed and forced to deal with the guy in my head. I wanted and needed to know him better.

That year was absolute chaos. A divorce that crippled my business and my time with my kids weighed heavy on me daily. A series of useless relationships, drinking heavily and doing my best to escape the pain was taking its toll. I wanted more from life than this. I wanted more from myself at this point in my life. I knew the only person that needed to get their shit straight was me. I was tired of running. 

As a kid my family was heavily involved in the Southern Baptist church. Because of that we were at church pretty much anytime the doors were open. In my experience, this section of christianity promotes dying to yourself, i.e. your wants are usually evil and shortsighted over everything. We are evil inherently and we are always needing to be saved. The focus is attempting to let God come in and guide you. This was something, no matter how hard I tried, that I could never wrap my head around. After my divorce I spent hours crying on the floor at church. Asking for God to change me, make me different. I went from pleading for God to change me to being angry at why he made me such a fuck up. Why was my life like this if he made me in his image? Why did I want the things I wanted? Why was I going through this if he had some almighty awesome plan for me?

I was asking the same questions for years. I wanted to be better and I wanted this almighty being to come into my life and change my habits and form a “new life”. I want to bring this up because I need you to understand where my head was at. Years and years of learning how evil we are as humans and how we are one step away from eternal damnation is hard to handle. It’s also extremely hard to conceptualize as a kid. It promotes fear beyond anything we can rationally imagine and usually generates fear based responses. I went through years of heavy guilt because I wasn't able to jump on the baptist logic train. I was at a point where the guilt and fear was at its peak. I was either going to meet Jesus in those woods or I was going to break free of this poisonous lie that was dominating my life. I had no idea what 24 hours alone in the woods would do for my brain, my soul and my thought processes. I went into the woods broken, lost and wildly emotional. I came out a different man. 

The first few hours out there were beautiful. Trudging through the leaves playing fetch with Banks. Looking at the fall colors in the trees and enjoying the process of setting up camp. Once I got everything set up and the fire started I sat down. I set up my French press coffee maker for my first cup of coffee. I had beef stew planned for dinner and some club crackers. I stared at the flames for a while and poured my coffee. Sitting there I started to go through some serious sets of emotional waves.

It started with me feeling like I needed to check my phone constantly. It was amazing how nerve racking not being able to open my social media or check my messages was. I kept telling myself, “it's one night Chris chill out”. But irrational thoughts of my daughters being injured or my house catching on fire were racing through my head. This started a domino effect of emotional battle axes to my noggin. One after the other, every emotion was heavy. I was jumpy at any sound that was happening around me. I felt like the nerves all over my body were on fire. I was so anxious that I was missing out and fearful of the expanse of unknown around me that it was almost impossible for me to sit still. I would stand up and walk around for 45 minutes or more at a time. I was amazed at the power this device had over my brain and my absolute inability to detach from my little world. I was amazed that small sounds triggered my fight or flight response instantly. I kept telling myself that this was just my body going through withdraws from the stimulus I had created. I knew removing myself from the world I was so heavily involved in and from the stimuli I was using to forget or mask my emotions was going to be rough.

I finally sat down after several hours of walking and thinking and started to write down what I was feeling. I filled pages of my journal with my thoughts. I unloaded my mind in that book. Every emotion I felt, every angry word I wanted to say and everything in between. I had nothing to do but write. I broke down and cried heavily at the end of writing. I was at the lowest point in my life I had ever been.

There I was, sitting in a chair in the middle of the woods weeping. I don’t know if I would have helped me if I would have stumbled across me like that. I was so exhausted from unloading all of those feelings into that book that I felt numb. I reheated my cup of coffee and sat there. I stared into the dark woods imagining what animals were out there watching me by this fire. I wiped off my face and sipped my reheated coffee. The fear of the unknown in the woods was no longer there. I was void of emotions at this point and this is when I felt a different person emerge.

I was no longer the feeler of the emotions of the present, I was an observer.

I was so exhausted from unloading everything I had held on to for years that it removed my ability to spend any more energy on feeling. It was like I was watching myself sit in that chair. I stared into the forest for what felt like an eternity. Slowly drinking my coffee.

As I sat there I thought about what I wanted out of my life. What kind of life I wanted for my daughters, what kind of life I wanted to live and who I wanted to be.

I kept thinking about the last pastor I talked to and what he said. “Give it to Jesus” was his famous line. If he didn’t have an answer, he would do like most religious people I was seeking guidance from and just repeat that statement. I remember not being able to rationalize any real applicational knowledge from that statement and the frustration it caused inside of me. I remember hearing stories of awesome things happening because the individual “gave it to Jesus” and were blessed. I also remember people saying “ah, well looks like you didn’t pray hard enough” when it didn’t work out. I was able to see it for the first time clearly, due to my emotional brain dump. The concept wasn’t that God hated some and loved others. The concept is that we, as humans, have zero idea why things happen sometimes. We want to rationalize it with grand concepts like God and infinite wisdom so we can conceptualize it. It allows us to gain some sort of control over it. If we can’t rationalize it we are forced to rationalize the concepts behind it. We are so desperate to rationalize our existence that we ignore the fact that we exist at all. The statement “give it to Jesus” is just a way to rationalize an irrational situation. 

I was deep in this trap. This trap that I was somehow misguided and broken beyond belief. I was lost in this wicked world of sin destined for life in hell if I didn’t confess and change my ways. As I sat there thinking about the two times I was baptized, the four times I was saved then compared it to my current life I began to laugh. I was trying to fulfill a void not created by me, but created by those around me. I was told from a young age that life here on earth was for serving, giving and dying to yourself. I was told that every day you have to wake up, start with apologizing for your sinful nature and then hope that this almighty power would give you a sliver of blessing to make the day not suck. Of course I was where I was. I expected it. I brought it on myself. I subconsciously expected my life to be full of turmoil and pain because I was told from childhood that life is just turmoil and pain! 

The concept that I was this broken animal needing help was beyond my understanding. All I could see were humans doing amazing things. Building skyscrapers, cars, planes and traveling into space. We are constantly testing the limits of our abilities and are constantly expanding our reality of what is possible. How could we be destined for damnation when we were able to create so much happiness? We spend so much time focused on the eternal that we can’t explain or figure out that we miss the beauty and power around us.

I came to this conclusion, sitting in my chair, drained of emotion.

We are not subject to any concepts or ideas that we don’t willingly bring into our lives.

I sat there, sipping my coffee, listening to the sounds around me. Paying attention to everything I was previously ignoring. I was so focused on myself that I missed the power and beauty around me. I spent probably another hour or so sitting there enjoying this before I went to bed. I slept hard, probably 10 hours total. When I woke up I felt like an elephant was removed from my chest. I was able to sit in silence with no pain, no stress of missing out or struggle.

I slowly packed everything up, and walked slowly back to my car. On the way I played fetch with my dog several times and took about a hundred detours. I loaded up my car, my dog jumped in and we left. I had no missed calls, no text, no social media anything.

The fear I battled was completely made up. That same fear was left in those woods.

We are not subject to any concepts or ideas that we don’t willingly bring into our lives. We are the deciders of our fate. We are the commanders of our ships. We have the power to adjust our environments and our habits. Our ability to look inside ourselves, to ask those ugly questions and to unpack our decision making processes is our superpower, our supernatural connection to the universe and our souls. Unpack that duffle bag of thoughts and get it on paper. Once you do you will be able to understand what it is to be the observer of our feelings, not the feeler. You will free yourself from yourself.