Image Credit: Daniela Ginta

By Daniela Ginta

The way I see it

GINTA: Make time for time away – you’ll be better for it

Aug 17, 2020 | 11:59 AM

WE LEFT KAMLOOPS LAST SATURDAY and returned a week later. Our camping destination was just that: away from the craziness of life, away from breaking news and that obsessive daily COVID-19 count.

It’s been a crazy year so far and we’ve yet to see how it ends. Worries are piled high for young and old and everyone in between. One way to escape is to turn off phones and step away from everything social media even for just a few days.

The other reset button is being in nature, where life goes about at a slower speed and that’s what we found in our chosen camping spot by the lakeside.

We’d wake up to early morning silence and loons gliding over the glassy lake surface, their mysterious silhouettes matching our sleepy memories of their haunting calls in the nighttime.

It’s the kind of treasure I want to hand over to my sons – the peacefulness of time spent in nature, silent witnesses to the wonder of life unfolding with a rhythm of its own. Yes, we alter some of it with our way of life, but we get reminded repeatedly that nature bats last.

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I did not miss my phone and I was not curious about the events unfolding while we were away. In fact, we returned to a world that seemed to be just as crazy as the one we had left behind a week ago.

It does the mind and soul good to be separated from what we have so easily come to accept as our daily grind, particularly the rollercoaster of news.

Much like our own hearts open in wild, slow-paced places, so do the hearts of our children. We all need to have enough time for unscheduled life, screen-less but with plenty of playtime of the kind summer is made for. The kind that keeps you in the water for hours and then sends you shivering to warm up by the fire where stories are told, and laughter goes around and around until the sky is bursting with stars.

And don’t forget the scary stories. The good kind, not the ones you’re escaping from for those few days. The kind that makes kids snuggle a bit closer as you bundle together in the tent for a good sleep. It’s what memories are made from. And never mind the bug bites; you must have something to show for it once back.

So go ahead, give yourself a chance to forget about the world as it is for a bit and populate life with summer adventures that help you fill memory space with enough ‘remember that time…’.

We’re blessed to live in a place that offers so much so close to home. There’s almost no excuse to not step off the beaten track and slow down the pace for a bit – one day or one month, or anything in between.

Emotional survival is not about running on fumes, though that happens too often, but finding the space and time where we can fill up on what we need the most, yet we may so easily forget about: simplicity.

It’s about being reminded that we hear our thoughts better when we turn down all the everyday life noise and make room for nature’s gift of silence which we’re so profoundly connected to but tend to forget.

Let’s not. Hiding away by a lake or trailing up mountain paths is the one thing we can still get out of a year that’s been bringing us down with one too many overwhelming happenings.

Here’s to making the best of what’s left of it.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.