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A Message From A Cured Zombie

• July 2012
• Simple Living Travel

Hi Steph,

I am an Aussie (you should visit ‘down under’ sometime), mid 20’s and a dirtbag at heart. I love the outdoors, it is the reason I enjoy rockclimbing. When you grow up in wilderness like the Blue Mountains (west of Sydney… you should check it out) it is hard to not want to give up everything an immerse yourself in its wild and enormous beauty. This is also the reason I went to university to become a biologist and am now living in the ugly urban wilderness of Perth doing my PhD in ecology. I have a great opportunity, 3 years of study, with a great scholarship, working in a remote, pristine, unknown, hot and truly uniquely beautifully wild salt lake. I guess my carrot should be the PhD I get at the end. But it’s not. The carrot is being able to go climbing and travelling. I find myself not waiting to grab my backpack, sleeping bag, shoes and ropes, and just start living on the rock by day and dirt by night. I no longer find myself desiring to have a lustrous career as an academic. Academia does not interest me. This PhD process has taught me, just like law school taught you, that this is not what I want to do.

I think your book was a great read. I enjoyed it greatly and thank you for writing it. Write another? Hahaha. But everything you wrote about is stuff that I had figured out earlier, but your book really helped gel it all together. “The hardest thing to do is simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex”. And this is the way I try to live my life. Whether it is the food I eat, the way I travel, the things I buy, or they way I work, I simplify everything. I do not worry about anything, have never lost sleep on anything and have never understood what ‘being stressed’ meant. I think plenty of my friends will say that about me.

That was until I moved into a city. Cities really suck balls. I have never felt so lonely as when being on a busy train, surrounded by 100’s of people, bumping shoulders with 5 strangers, but none looking in to your eyes, none acknowledging your existence! Everybody staring at white rectangles that they caress so dearly in the palms of their hands, sacrificing their brain cells for multi-national corporations to further suck our souls away. Filling your life with complex gadgets, like smartphones, laptops, having earphones glued to you ears, generally complicating your life, turns you into a zombie! And I think I was slowly turning into one of them.

But your book was a fresh breath of air during those train commutes and stopped me from turning into a zombie. Yes, people looked at me funny when reading from one of those antique inventions where words are printed on paper, which are glued together to form a book (I think you need an ‘e-reader’ now to read a book). But you re-awoke me. I started questioning the trajectory of my life, and am now making plans for my future. I think your book taught me that you should never say never. The day my scholarship terminates on 14 August 2014, thesis completed or not, I will rid myself of the concrete jungle, starless nights, traffic undertones and the lonely crowds. I am going to places where the jungles are made of trees, where the nights glow with starlight, where insects and birds muse your ears, and where loneliness is replaced by insignificance. I am not going to be a zombie with a big job, big house and big problems.

Give me an e-mail if you ever come to Australia and need a belay bunny/partner =)

Thanks for your inspirational book,
Chris

Dear Chris,
Thanks for your beautiful letter. I have a feeling you’ll finish your thesis by 2014: that’s two years! And exciting to think of the next chapter…. 🙂 But I’m curious, what is the lake? I have some friends from Perth, and they seem to be gradually moving to Moab. I know what you mean about cities. It’s hard to feel like a normal creature in them, isn’t it.
Good luck with the now and the next,
🙂 Steph