In the last few weeks I have been rather ill and as a consequence I have been inside for much of that time. This morning, when I went outside just for the sake of being outside, I realized how much of a toll living in has on me.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.

Living out is a completely different sensory experience than living in.  When you live in a van, you know the weather without the internet. You know it because, dry and curled under blankets on the foam bed, your face feels the cool sting of winter. Your nose always knows whether it has rained in the night. The crimson leaves flying past the windshield, which you can see from the nest in the back, tells you how fast the wind is moving. The thing about living out is that you always feel a part of the world; you receive constant signals of inclusion from everything around you.

There are hard things about living out of course. Police is a big one.  Acquisitiveness as security is another. You have to be flexible, ready to move on, you have to keep only those things that really matter to living well, you have to have a realistic view of what people will actually do when confronted with difference they don’t understand. And perhaps most importantly, you have to have enough anger to fight back and enough self-discipline to know when to keep quiet and run. These skills are based on knowing that other people really do exist and upon the fact that world was not created for you, in fact not even “created” but, like you, in a constant state of on-the-fly creation. In other words, living out is not for the mentally ill, not for the victims of the world and not for the self-obsessed.

My life right now is mundane. I have a job, financial responsibilities, a commitment to heal.  What this means is that I spend a good deal of my time inside.  Still, before getting sick this last time, I used to go out after work to someplace where I could sit or walk outside. I like to take my car, for example, to the beach, walk for a bit then curl up in the back seat under my blankets with the windows open and read.  I also like to sit outside at the cafe, watch people and animals move around in the world, drink tea and read. Sometimes I go to the dog park, watch the dog wander excitedly from smell-spot to smell-spot, sit near the lake and read. When it gets cold here in the winter, I like to sit at those restaurants that have the propane outdoor heaters, have lunch outside watching the rain and the grey quilted sky and yet be warm and dry. And yes, read.

My head is a place of frequent residence. I am not a person to enjoy exercise for its own sake, and if I go with someone out to the “wilderness” I’d rather make camp and then sit by myself just inside the edge of the trees and watch all the things that go on around me. So you’d think I would be a shoe-in for the day spent at the library or something. But I’m not. If I had a choice between reading in and reading out, I would read out, and even more radically, if I had to choose between watching the world do its thing and reading, I’d choose the world. Luckily, I haven’t had to make the choice.

The swirling confusion that is the world of life, air, water, earth and fire gives me something that underpins everything else, including reading.

For example, I am current reading Jeffrey Foss’s book called Science and the Riddle of Consciousness A Solution. A read-in book, you’d think. But no. I read the first three chapters when I was in the hospital and I have to say (along with a novel by Lewis Owens) it was the solace of my time there. I am now reading the last chapters of the book and those are being read between the coffee shop sidewalk and the beach. And somehow, it’s a different (even better) book — but of course that isn’t really the case. What’s true is that I am a different reader under different circumstances.

What makes the difference in me is that swirl of sensation that being out provides. Without even paying attention, just having an eddy of air circle my wrist, tells me something extraordinary about what it means to be a human being. The blare of colour that is autumn and the red rain jacket that just walked by. The crow call and the rain blat blat on the canopy above me. The braided stream pattern washing the sidewalk. The splat of a four-year-old’s yellow rain boots as they simultaneously hit the puddle at the edge of the road. Her mother’s hand pulling her across the street with the walk-light. The wet chrysanthemums in pots, the decaying Japanese maple leaves, the sodden bamboo and wet earth, mixed with coffee, curry and just-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls.  All this is happening to my senses while I read Foss and given what he is talking about (more on that in another post – it’s a great book), the sensory experience of being outside a controlled environment can’t help but augment what Foss is speaking about. A critical piece of that is what he calls the manifest system – that is the body and how it makes meaning and models the world – as I read Foss my manifest system is busily linking the whole world together and making it personally meaningful in ways that incorporate constant change, inclusiveness, belonging and sensuality.

My body/brain and all its systems were designed to happily chug away at the sensations that are rain and wind and light and smell, and because of how my life has been, the world and its swirl is not alien to me. I am not a feral child with respect to the earth and its social habits. All those things I learn and consistently reinforce just by being out — that I am part of the world, that I am at home where ever I am, that I am mortal and that I am alive right now, that I am a creature alongside myriad other creatures, that I am moving through my life inside the life that is the world — I learn just by being outside and paying attention. So of course, those lessons impact whatever particular lessons are coming to me from the pages of the book.

Living in just doesn’t provide the same resonance. Think about the lessons still air provides — enclosed spaces, light that has nothing to do with the sky, senses cut off from what’s happening on the earth, these are lessons too. The question is what do they teach? Using my emotional system as a reference grid, they don’t seem to teach about belonging. That’s the thing I have been missing while being ill, it’s the sense that I am here, now, and that I belong to the world. Oh how I wish my hospital bed could have been parked at the beach.

Anyway, I’m going back out now. More lessons to learn. See ya.