Spring Break Retreat – In Depth Conversation on the Trail

By Matthew Sakach

Over this resent spring break of 2007 I went on a trip up to a state park in West Virginia with a bunch of friends. When we were there we all we stayed in a large cabin that had electricity and hot water but other than that we were out in the middle of no-ware on a mountain. We spent a lot of time reading an just catching up on old times but the real experience of this outing was when a couple of us went hiking up the side of the mountain to get to an old look out tower. Sense we didn’t think it was going to be a very long hike we did not bring anything except some warm cloths. We began our hike with high expectations of reaching the lookout tower so we could catch the sunset. But as we trudged along we soon realized how winding the trail was and eventually found a marker that said we were 7 miles away from the tower! At that crossroads some of our friends headed back because they did not want to go any further up the trail in light of the distance we would have to cover. But three of us opted to continue onward. On our way up the trail it took an ever more increasingly steep incline and all I could think about was how horrible the path was, because the rangers had to have been up there within the week to clear away fallen trees with machinery, because the machine had torn up the way terribly. Also adding to my misery was the fact that the ground was very muddy due to the snow that had recently melted. My eyes were always focused on the trial and my mind was ever focused on getting to our destination and loathing the fact that we had to still come back down the trail. Needless to say I did not have the luxury of basking in the beauty of the countryside, their was also very little talking because I think they had to have been thinking the exact things I was. Eventually we came to another marker that said we were 3.5 miles away but we promptly decided to turn back. On the way down something interesting happened. I found that my mind was no longer troubled because we had already been over the terrain before and I did not have to worry about any destination because we knew the way back. As my mind was put to ease I found that I was able to look around a lot more and enjoy the sunset, even though we weren’t at the top. I can only guess that turning back had the same effect on the other two as well because suddenly a conversation was sparked. I never had a more in-depth conversation about Hinduism and Quantum Theory than I did that day. It seemed that just the ease of “auto-piloting” down the path and the fact that we had all the time it took to get down to the cabin to talk about anything gave way to an unexpected entrance to a type of mindset of “we have a lot of time and nothing can hamper that time” so we used this opportunity to delve into some deep thought.