“The world is beautiful, in many unfathomable ways. In our hurrying, though, we frequently miss what is beautiful, in the same way that we forget from time to time what we want our lives to mean.”

I recently came across these two sentences in the latest issue of National Geographic from an essay on permafrost, written by Barry Lopez. It spoke of the impact of global warming on the frozen lands of our planet, and the impact on the planet of these lands becoming unfrozen. And it spoke of the beauty of these lands. The facts in the essay were interesting, the photographs were spectacular, but these two lines spoke to me.

I spent this morning completing various office tasks, crossing them off this week’s new to-do list as I went along. On my walk back to the office after going home for lunch, with many more to-dos’ waiting for me, I remembered these lines. So, instead of jumping right back into the list, I’ve set off for an afternoon saunter to see some of the beauty that I’ve been missing. 

No more than five minutes into the walk, and I notice a pair of mule deer, well camouflaged against the earthy tones of the landscape. I quietly walk to within about fifty feet from them. The doe and her large fawn of last spring appear relaxed and not all that concerned with me. A casual look would have them looking almost like twins, the juvenile just a bit smaller than its mother. But as I study them, I see that the younger one is quite a bit darker. Both are showing healthy winter coats, but the younger one’s is much more brown, with less white under its neck. Where the adult’s tail area is bright white, the smaller one’s is much more tan.

They begin to wander away. I resume walking and spy a fallen ponderosa snag. I go over to get a closer look at several large holes pecked into its now pulpy trunk. One has a large cavity just below a one and a half inch hole. I wonder how many woodpeckers, chickadees, or nuthatches started their lives in there?

Now I’m examining a small deer antler that a young buck lost. I’m not the first to discover it. Many small teeth have been gnawing at it. In some places, it is nearly gnawed through. Dropped antlers are an important source of calcium for small mammals, and this shows lots of evidence of providing just that, so I leave it for the rodents.

I’m heading for a steep south-facing hillside just north of a drainage along the park’s upper road. I figure I’ll have about an hour of sunshine up there before the sun slides behind the ridge. I scramble up the loose scree and find an inviting place to sit against a crumbly piece of dull orange granite covered in many pale green lichens. I settle into my sunny perch. A chickadee calls from the dense forest across the drainage. The reddish brown soil seems to prefer growing small rocks, as there are lots of them. Several clumps of dried grasses sport prolific seeds. I recognize blue grama and little bluestem, a third species is mountain muhly, I think, and a fourth is beyond my knowledge of grasses. The yellow or reddish stems (bluestem has red stems – don’t ask me why it’s called bluestem) are moving ever so slightly in a breeze I cannot feel. A few small pines, a couple of dried asters, and some naked oaks round out the obvious of my immediate surroundings.

In the couple of hours since I left the office, I see why Lopez refers to “what is beautiful” and “what we want our lives to mean” in the same sentence. “We must journey out,” says Terry Tempest Williams, “so we might journey in.” These small journeys out into Nature’s simple beauty, like this afternoon saunter, serve as an antidote to the part of my life defined by to-do lists. But they are more than that. They also allow me opportunities to journey in, to look at my life against the bigger picture. Today, being out, I recognize a feeling that I feel more and more lately – that crossing things off to-do lists is becoming less and less satisfying.

For now, to-do lists are going to remain. I run a small, busy non-profit – there are always lists of things that need doing. And all of these little tasks do add up to very worthy accomplishments, which bring much rich meaning to my life. But, these journeys out also remind me that there is more to life than accomplishing things. There is much meaning in simply being out. There is much meaning in simply experiencing, and in not missing, what is beautiful.

~ Dave Van Manen, December 3, 2007