39 — Camping, Possibly.
I’ve known of the concept of camping for pretty much my whole life although I have never camped a single day in my life. Growing up, my limited imagination connected camping to tons of manual labor, technical equipment, ugly apparel, and poor hygiene. The people I knew who talked about it made it sound like so much hustle. Ah, all the things you’d have to pack! And, boy, those sleeping bags were so uncomfortable, I mean, sleeping on the ground! Who would want to do that? Compared to the comfort of a hotel and a cool air-conditioned room, I would have never dared to choose camping over comfort.
Although the idea of it on paper seemed appealing with the beauty and connection to nature, the silence, the individuality of each experience, the joy of hearing all the birds, and all the experts reporting how great it is to improve sleep quality, I’ve never done anything to make camping spark my interest. Not even when, in my many research spirals on how to improve my sleep or lack thereof, most podcasts referred to sleeping in nature as a godsent for resetting circadian rhythms and all that. As a modern cry for help, I even sent one of these podcast episodes to my boyfriend who, at the time, probably looked at me as if I was having some sort of identity crisis or brain fart so I moved on quite quickly from that idea of trying. F**k my circadian rhythm, I’m not sleeping anyway!
Several years have passed, and since then, the universe has brought me closer to the topic with old and new friends revealing their enjoyment of the experience and, dare I say, swearing by camping altogether defining it as soothing for the soul, transformative, and overall W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L. As the curious person that I am, I have asked questions that turned in long and deep conversations on the topic and I’m not so secretly starting to understand what they see in it.
We’ve talked about campervans, car camping, and bike camping but I couldn’t seem to steer away from one question, the most important one: if you are an incredibly anxious person (hello!), would you be able to enjoy camping?
I have been told that camping instead helps with anxiety.
Apparently, the exposure to nature, better sleep, and the mindfulness that comes with disconnecting from technology and all the daily stressors contribute to better overall mental health.
But what about wildlife? Bugs? For goodness sake, snakes!
And what about using a toilet? For goodness sake, privacy!
I have also been told that there are solutions to all these points and more, that there’s no better way than waking up and making a hot pot of coffee whilst you are surrounded by nature, that food tastes better out in the open, and that you can also have a toilet and privacy around it but also that you don’t have to sleep on the floor.
The internet also seemed to have turned to the outdoors as ‘the place to be’.
Did we all collectively get tired of the noise of metropolitan cities and between campervan conversions, van life, car camping and just camping in general, all turned into the outdoorsy types? I am not sure. What I know tho, is that by living in Sweden I am getting closer and closer to trying.
This brings up the Gothenburg topic.
If you approach it with the eyes of a city mouse like I have been, knowing the cities I’ve lived in, then even if it’s the second biggest city in Sweden with about six hundred thousand inhabitants, it feels like a small pond where life quickly becomes extremely repetitive especially if you expect to experience it like a city. That’s kind of what I have done. I have expected from it the same kind of stimulation of a big city like new museum exhibitions, a variety of good coffee shops, bookstores, magazine shops, concept stores, cultural events, and an overall vibrancy that I connect with any international city.
I don’t like to bring anyone down (not even cities!), so I’ll just say that there’s very little vibrancy or stimulation from that city mouse perspective, instead, the vibrancy is towards family life (including having lots and lots of kids), interiors (by making your home an Instagrammable one), closed friends groups, and, finally, nature.
There’s a lot of nature in Gothenburg and that’s not just because of the archipelago. Forests, natural reserves, tons of lakes, and tiny little towns that are as idyllic as one could imagine. Who knows, in a few years you might find me in a ditsy dress, mending the garden in my traditional wooden home with wicker outdoor furniture, waiting for my homemade pasta to slowly dry to be served with poise on some wonderful ‘loppis-found’ porcelain plates featuring some English country blue motif, but for now, I’m going to have to stick to the idea of possibly trying camping.