The Outdoor Life

For a person who has been largely confined to a mostly indoor existence, it would appear quite strange that I would partake in a large variety of outdoor activities. While I'm not an extreme outdoor activities person, over the course of these few months, I realise that I am actually more sporty than I realise I ever could be.

Circumstances back in the day dictated that I had to refrain from strenuous physical activity to protect myself against flare-ups of my dermatitis. It was notsomuch that I was that sensitive to the problems, but that due to the whole regimented nature in which all the physical activities were conducted (school classes, military training), I was unable to take steps towards alleviating the conditions that would cause a flare-up all in the name of conformity. But now, free from all these arbitrarily designed limitations, I am free to pursue this side of human life that I have been robbed off in childhood.

It might come as a surprise to some that I am actually practising Aikido on a very regular basis. There is something about taking breakfalls, throwing and pinning people that make it a very good stress reliever. Having to focus one's weight into a single point has a way of literally maintaining the balance of the body, and all the conditioning exercises that precede each training session has seen their effects on my body. Not only do I have more stamina now than before, I have found that it becomes much easier to concentrate my strength to whatever task I need, with much less incidence of injury due to improper positioning or wrongful application of force. Aikido or any other martial art has a strange way of increasing one's spatial awareness, and that alone has made it much easier to enjoy the outdoor life.

Apart from being the occasional cyclist, most of my outdoor life activities revolve around the activity of Geocaching. Geocaching is hardly a new phenomenon since it has been around for more than a decade by now, but it is only recently that I have the wherewithal to actually pursue it with more aggression and enthusiasm than before. Partly due to the effects of some of the more enthusiastic geocachers that I have converted, and partly because I could attach some faces to the names that I see in the online geocache logs, my activities with regards to this has increased by quite a fair bit. To say that geocaching is a waste of time is not quite correct, since it is with geocaching that one would have the opportunity to go around a location, enjoying the natural sights and sounds and company, with the ultimate reward of finding that elusive geocache. Indeed, I would not have bashed through jungles, spelunked, traipsed over low tide beaches and the like if I weren't geocaching. Some people question the rewards of geocaching, often asking questions to the tune of ``so what happens when you find a geocache?''. To ask such a question seems to defeat the whole purpose of geocaching to begin with---the reward is not about the geocache you find, but the journey it took you to get there. In fact, one of the tenets of a geocache hide is that if there was nothing else interesting about the place where the geocache was hidden, perhaps it was not a good idea to hide it there in the first place.

But the outdoor life didn't come completely from geocaching of course. Ever since I was confined to the indoors I have always had that romantic view of adventures all over the world, travelling and exploring places that are less trodden, seeking for interesting formations, architectural ruins and the like. The books that I enjoyed a lot were those that chronicled the travels of adventurers; if I couldn't go to those places that they had gone, at least I could experience them vicariously. Perhaps that is a reason why I enjoy anthropological documentaries, where anthropologists travel to some tribe far from the urban civilisation and do a study on their customs and way of life, and to study the impact of both globalisation and the rise of capitalism (and religious proselytising).

And yes, even as I am writing this and working, I am already thinking on the next adventure I should go on. Number of jungles bashed: 3. Number of strange tunnels spelunked: 1. Amount of fun and experience in the process: Priceless.

Till the next adventure.