WHAT THE FORCES OF MOTHER NATURE TAUGHT ME ABOUT HUMAN NATURE

When I approached my 5 year anniversary at Camp of the Woods back in 2024, I wasn’t feeling as excited as I thought I should be for having crossed a threshold of time.

I reluctantly signed up for a class titled Writing Sadness Through Humor, scared that it might actually mean that I was sad. And, well, sadness was just….unacceptable.

The brilliant title not only gave me permission to be sad, it assigned me to be sad to be successful. So, I set out to write things that made me cry.

What Do Relationships Have to Do With It?

Assignment One: Write about an important relationship in your life

I started writing about a close personal relationship, and what made me sad about it. But putting the words on paper that I had already spoken didn’t change my own perspective. And worse, it didn’t change the other person’s mind to do what I wanted them to do instead of what they wanted to do.

So I started writing about another important relationship in my life. The one I had with Camp of the Woods. As I thought back to the year of the high water (I’m not even going to think about using the F word), I gleaned the insight I needed to solve the conflict that was making me sad.

It's Not Personal

I realized that human nature and mother nature are very much the same. Both need to do what they need to do for reasons I don’

t understand. Just like the weather happens without compassion for the destruction it leaves behind,  people need to do what they need to do without regard for the hurt feelings they leave in their wake.

Seeing people as uncontrollable forces of nature changed things for me in a a big way. It helped me realize not to take things personally, and to be more comfortable being a force of nature myself.