The woods.

it would be easy for me to write either an account of my day or a litany of complaints for some stretch of my life. Those are the two things I'd most like to avoid. The easy has never worked well for me. Not to say the hard has worked particularly well either. I suppose I just have a thing for a challenge.

As much as I dislike where I'm from, the mountains are beautiful. I could disappear into the woods so easily. It's not like disappearing into a crowd. It's not like being alone in a city.

I know I'm wrong, but I feel like I mightn't have gone crazy in the woods. I would have gone crazy with those people, but not in some woods, somewhere, without the small town bullshit.

My point is that when I'm in the woods I feel alright. Things don't bother me quite so much, and when they do I can go out and my stupid decisions hurt no one but me.

My thoughts about it are more that our lack of adaptation to the cities, and large groupings of people is what puts me ill at ease. The woods, the ancestral condition is so calming for me because all of my evolutionary adaptations are for that situation. I even wrote a novella about the idea of city living driving someone insane. The fact is that I don't feel like our ordered singular existences fit with the current fact of what we are as a species. We haven't had enough time in this world to fit it.

It's one of those things I wonder about.

Incidences and prevalences of mental illnesses in rural areas would be nice to see. Of course the lack of reportage and increase in stigma in small towns would make things difficult.

The point is, that walking through the woods today (I went on a hike) I didn't feel as unbalanced as I had been the rest of this week.