Returning to Childhood Wilderness in a Pandemic - Personal Choice (Adam Stillabower)

     Something that has been on everyone in the mind of the world for the past six months has been this organizational nightmare of COVID-19. From the early stages of the virus, people were unsure of how to react and, to differing extents per country and organization, permitted it to get out of control. I am sure everyone at this point has been impacted by this pandemic in some way, shape, or form. Some have felt dissuaded by the governmental policies and lockdowns while others have had to come to terms with losing loved ones to this viral illness. Personally, my Grandfather has been suffering from its complications, already fighting the beginning stages of Parkinson’s prior to getting infected. He’s been able to recover, but that threat of loss is still real and painful for all those whose loved ones are susceptible. With the mandated lockdowns, people are constantly around the news, immediate family members, and technology that keeps us in the loop in the news. In the beginning months, I took to taking walks through the wooded portions of my neighborhood, just getting lost in the trees, in an attempt to escape the suffocating feeling of being forced to stay at home. By all means, I do understand and advocate for this sort of action by the government in order to control the spread of the virus, but it still weighed significantly on myself and my generation. Those walks that I took were genuinely freeing, returning to the woods of my childhood, remembering all the school projects and shenanigans that my friends and I used to get up to on those trails. It was very much bittersweet, reminiscing about the good, innocent times of childhood while longing for the complexities of getting older in a constantly changing world to cease.