Speedrunning aliveness

lessons from the natural world

Banff National Park — July 2024

Recently, I spent a few days exploring Banff National Park in Alberta. It’s been a while since I’ve spent meaningful time in the wilderness and as we wandered the park, I was transported back to a time when my love affair with the (US) national park system first began a decade ago.

I contemplate and write a lot about what it means to return to our true nature. I can trace the origin of my own journey back to myself to my introduction to the national park ecosystem.

What started as a bucket list quest to visit and check off the most epic places in the US has transformed into a quieter, more subtle desire to be in the presence of unbridled, soul-stirring beauty — to reconvene with the wonder and awe that once flowed through me as a child.

I stumbled upon national parks at just the right moment in my life. I was in my early 20s, a recent college grad entering an era when life was becoming more routine than it had ever been. As my friends and I settled into the corporate world, we were eager to make the most of our vacation days and embark on adventures that we didn’t previously have the money to fund. Soon, we started planning roadtrips to parts of the US we’d never been.

As we scouted each trip, it quickly became clear that national parks were worthy destinations to center our adventures around. The majority of national parks in the US were westward so for several years, whenever I took time off from work, I flew west and found myself face to face with the most breathtaking views I’d ever seen.

snapshots from early national park (and adjacent landmark) trips: Horseshoe Bend, Grand Canyon National Park, and Hoover Dam

Growing up on the east coast, my family frequented our local state park and lived a quick drive from the Appalachian Trail. But, despite the outdoors being my backyard, I never seemed to be prepared for what awaited me each time we drove into a new national park: otherworldly landscapes that often left me wondering if this is what heaven on earth looked like.

Several years later, my now husband, Ryan, and I contemplated where we wanted to move after our time in Boston. The fact that California is home to nine national parks, more than any other state, was a primary draw as we narrowed in on San Francisco. The idea of living a weekend trip away from a dozen national parks seemed like the exact type of life we wanted to cultivate in our next season and eventually, we moved west.

speedrunning to what end?

At first, we double downed on our mission to visit all 63 national parks. During COVID, we drove cross-country to the east coast for a summer and back, hitting 12 national parks over the course of the trip. When we returned home, we agreed that speedrunning the parks didn’t feel as fulfilling as it once did.

When we lived on the east coast, visits felt scarce. We only had a few days to make the most of our time off so we did every hike and roadtripped to as many parks as possible. Now, it felt like we were manufacturing scarcity for the sake of completing our bucket list. Rather than optimizing and exhausting ourselves, what if we actually grounded into each experience in a deeper way?

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

— Lao Tzu

By then, we were three and a half years into living in San Francisco and ready to plant roots. Around that time, I was deepening my meditation practice and divesting my energy away from self-improvement towards inner work. After years of unconsciously grappling with the notion that I needed to constantly improve myself, something within me was slowly awakening to the fact that this approach wasn’t working.

Life was objectively going well and yet, I once again felt like I was living a life that did not feel like my own. This time, rather than rely on a new job search to cure my existential dread, I turned inwards, unraveling scripts of who I was and questioning why I did the things I did.

Our move to San Francisco afforded us more time to spend in the natural world, made possible by the ample local hikes and iconic urban parks sprawled across the city. I spent hours walking and running through Golden Gate Park, contemplating my obsession with optimizing every aspect of my life — even the parts that were supposed to be easeful and fun.

Where does the drive to check every national park off our bucket list come from? What’s the underlying need I’m trying to fulfill?

Is the wonder and awe I experience only possible when we’re in the presence of dramatic, sweeping views? When else do I feel like I come alive?

Is it really not worth returning to any of our favorite parks until we’ve seen them all?

What am I searching for?

Despite being quite self-aware, I had never taken the time to push on the stories and beliefs that had taken root within me. Over the years, I simply bought into these narratives, taking pride in knowing myself “well” and further solidifying what I believed to be true — I am this type of person, not that type of person.

It wasn’t until this season of my life that I was ready to grapple with the truth of how I’d been hardwired and dismantle the beliefs that had long taken hold of me.

chasing aliveness

Through my renewed relationship with meditation, I found myself reconnecting with my intuition and sitting with the impermanence of life.

I had come to believe that thrilling experiences only came in the form of novelty and payoffs, working towards the next big thing or hiking towards a sweeping view.

I led my life in accordance with this belief, rarely visiting the same place twice and never reading the same book again or watching the same movie over.

What I came to realize was that it wasn’t novelty that I had been searching for, it was the feeling of aliveness and a connection to the grand scheme of it all.

There’s so much wisdom in nature that when we notice it, it awakens possibility within us. It is through communing with nature that we move closer to our own nature.

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

Grappling with this reality shifted the pace at which I traveled and how I viewed humanity’s relationship with nature. I used to allow the expansiveness of the natural world to move me for a brief moment before returning to reality, ready to plot my next roadtrip. Perhaps it was because I was suppressing the grief of knowing that the aliveness I felt in that moment would dissipate as soon as I returned home and back to the daily grind. I was desperate to tee up another adventure to look forward to.

As I found myself navigating the depths of inner work, I began to cultivate moments of presence on walks through Golden Gate Park.

Slowly, tiny moments of awe emerged.

The sunlight streaming through the tree canopy just right.

The smell of the morning dew hanging in the air before the hustle and bustle of the day began.

The perfectly placid lake rippling under the weight of a swan landing on its surface.

I no longer solely relied on epic trips to the most remote parts of the US to get in touch with wonder, awe, and my innate nature. When I opened myself up to the magic, I found glimmers of it in the every day.

All along, I had been searching for ways to come alive and feel something. To be moved. It took stumbling across national parks and being surrounded by life in the form of plants, trees, and wildlife for me to connect with the aliveness dormant within me. An energy that was once second nature to younger me.

Once those feelings were evoked in me, I did everything I could to chase it down. When we’ve become detached from what makes us come alive, external experiences can serve as a gateway to reconnect with those feelings.

But after some time, if we find ourselves returning back to our day-to-day, devoid of life force, it’s time to ask ourselves: what needs to change in our life?

the only constant

Nature has taught me that this existence is fleeting and ephemeral. It’s taught me that wildfires destroy beautiful things, that glaciers shrink with each return, that blue skies can turn orange. It’s taught me about the passage of time and the cycle of life. Had I spent my entire life chasing one park after another, I would have missed out on all these lessons and the subtle changes that were only obvious on the return.

Sometimes, when we visit the same place twice, it teaches us far more about ourselves and the world than we could’ve learned from the novelty of another new arrival.

When we learn to internalize this truth, daily life begins to feel far less mundane. The flow of life begins to feel mystical. We begin to see the magic of it all in the smallest, most unexpected ways. We realize that awe isn’t just found in the presence of primordial beauty, that we can romanticize our life and time on this earth regardless of where we are.

tiny beautiful things

Most mornings, I find myself writing at a local park, not far from my apartment. Adjacent to the park is a historical landmark that people from across the world come to visit.

On any given day, the park is filled with visitors, setting their sights on this part of the city for the first time. I can see the joy in their actions — the ways they enthusiastically line up for a selfie or the ways families excitedly point to the skyline, chatting in their native tongue. I imagine their experience isn’t so different from the awe I’ve felt when I first lay eyes on a new stunning landscape.

Then I see locals going about their day, walking their dogs, having seen this view more times than they can count. And many days, that’s me. Rushing through the park on my way to the next thing.

It so clearly illuminates the stark nature of our relationship with place based on familiarity and frequency. For some people, this is the first and last time they'll ever stand here, taking in this view — their experience filled with magic, wonder, and perhaps a desire to stay. For locals, we’ll likely pass by this view another hundred, thousand times. And one day, maybe without realizing it, we’ll take in this view one last time too.

Despite the daily routines we find ourselves tethered to, the places and moments we inhabit are always changing. We never experience the same place twice — it's never the same group of people taking photos of it, the same weather pattern passing through, or the same thoughts moving through our head.

It’s easy to believe that it takes traveling to an epic destination to find the magic we’re in search of. But one day, perhaps not too long from now, we’ll experience some aspect of our life for the last time and there’s no promise that our lives tomorrow will look the same as it did today.

Ironically, now that we live a few hours drive away from the entrance of multiple national parks, we spend far less time venturing out which is why the trip to Banff a few weeks ago was so meaningful. It reminded me of a time when I relied on these trips to stir something within me and now, it doesn’t take a trip into the wilderness to come home to myself.

The homecoming, the grounding, the expansiveness is in every moment I cultivate presence. The peace and ease I once sought from the external world has finally settled within me.

I’d love to hear how this piece resonated with you — let me know in the comments or say hi on Twitter :)

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

On giving up control

A lifetime of should-ing

Rest is for the dead and other misconceptions about worthiness

Thanks to Ryan for reviewing a draft of this essay and helping me shape my initial idea.