Hiking through the Past

Over-educated.

Over-saturated.

Over-caffeinated.

I think that the above three lines could be understood as the phrases that will come to embody the twentysomethings.

The thing that is great about life is that you can have complete control over everything that you do. You are not molded into being anything that you do not want to be. Assimilation is death.

I went hiking again. I say again as I used to enjoy the activity quite a bit, but stopped. It had a lot to do with the fact that there are not many places to hike in Austin. Contrary, there are plenty in Phoenix and thus I went hiking again. It was the same as I remembered as the mountain had not moved at all even though I did try to cut it down with the side of my hand. But, everything else changed.

Now, more than ever, people are going to college. People are gaining higher education before they enter the workforce machine of society. I have two college degrees. Those degrees are symbols that yes I can survive challenges and yes I am over-educated to exist.

When people become over-educated they are often called pretentious. This label identifies them as not being accepted for normal conversation. When a conversation evolves itself through the normal pre-curses, these pretentious people will always come off with an air of supremacy.

The great thing about hiking is that it gets you outdoors. This is something that I have been looking forward to for months. The possibility to just go into nature and gain perspective. This is important as my idols all had woods by their homes in which they would often get lost into. I look at hiking as I look at thinking. It is this challenging activity that starts without a clear end and along the way you can get injured but you know when you have stumbled across something truly sublime.

The conversations that I share with people are that of normal things. The weather, work situations, politics, sports, movies, music, TV, books and whatever other hobby questionnaire that gets filled out by our uncomfortable thoughts. I meet new people everyday. There is something amazing when you meet someone you have never spoke to before. You connect on a level that you had not experienced in a while. Sure, we have our closest friends that we love seeing, but we know all about them already. When you meet someone new, everything is new. It is a beautiful thing. But, the challenge lies in what happens after that goes stale. Are you still friends? Are you still romantic? Or, do you just move on to the next new friend?

These journeys that happen in our lives are never supposed to be that important. They are random threads that started with one goal and concluded with an entirely new one. For example, I started this hike to get exercise and get outdoors. I did not intend to journey through my subconscious to the point that everything made sense again. We always get what we need, not exactly what we are looking for. If we look for something, we miss out on the little things as they would distract us from the objective. Why must we always have an objective?

Over-educated, pretentious people love to meet new people so they can exercise the education and views they have. I am terrible and have been known to do this quite often. As a society, we are programmed to ask why something happened and then register an opinion on either side of the argument so we chime in on the discussion. We do this without ever knowing what we are really doing.

We continue to debate about others actions and morals. We talk about what is happening in everyone else’s life as it provides comfort to our own. Is that not shallow? Is that not exactly what we told ourselves that we would never do? We are creatures of action, not discussion.

Ok, this is a random jamble of awesome. But, this is how my mind was working as I reached the summit of the mountain. As I looked over the rows and rows of Track homes with the brown cloud of pollution hovering over I realized that I was not alone. I realized that this place is full of people that are doubting their lives. People that are questioning their actions and their decisions. People that just need to stop thinking and trying to fix everything.

Remember this my over-educated friends with the doubt of generations of possibilities on your shoulders. There is nothing to fix. Nothing is broken. Everything is in its right place and everything will work out as it should. This planet and this energy that we breathe in has been around for longer than we could imagine and is not going anywhere. There is no reason to get worked up over the smallest of details nor will what time of jeans you wear cure your soul.

Connect with new people. Keep your old friends. Long for challenges that will make you a new person. Do not try and hold onto your memories as you will miss out on new ones. The longer you stay in sorrow, the longer your grieving period when you realize that the clock of time has no pause button. Always be moving forward and know that each morning when you wake up you are stronger than the previous evening when you went to slumber.

Moral: Go outside and get some exercise, it will make your mind sharper. Connect with new people as you never know when you are about to meet your new best friend. Keep your old friends, as they will always make you feel like a kid and you have been through a lot together. Seize the day, stop reading this and call someone you need to apologize to or embrace a challenge that will re-shape how you think of yourself.