Every year since I was 12 years old I've gone camping for a week with my father in Quetico provincial park, in Ontario, Canada. I'm now 32, so that makes 20 years of wilderness canoeing and backpacking in a fairly remote area. I've learned a great deal about a surprising breadth of subjects from these trips. Not just about camping, but about life in general.

This blog will serve as my means of getting some of these lessons, concepts, and ideas down. This is mostly for my own sake, but I hope that as the amount of information here expands it will become an increasingly valuable resource for people who have a curiosity about this world, this universe, and our station in both.

The impetus for this blog came while I was camping with some friends some time ago. I watched in amusement as they placed three large logs on top of some paper and leaves and tried repeatedly and futilely to start a fire. When I advised that they needed to get a small fire going with lots of small pieces, then gradually work up to larger sticks, and eventually logs, I was amazed to find that they scorned the audacity of my interruption. They remarked that there was no one right way to build a fire and proceeded to argue with each other about whether the logs should in a tepee formation or a log cabin.

I was dumbfounded.

There is a right way to build a fire. I know this. I know this because I've had to do it in the rain. I've had to do it in a hurry, I've had to do it with limited resources, and I've had to do it to keep warm -- even to fight back hypothermia -- not just to roast marshmallows. It is true that there are many actions that will eventually, under the right circumstances, create a fire. Most of these ways will take too long, make too much smoke, not create a nice bed of coals, and most importantly, will never work when you need a fire most -- when you are cold and wet and in a hurry to build a fire.

This knowledge doesn't make me better than other people in general -- just better than most people at building fires.




What I'm getting at is that we as a society, we as a species, have forgotten how to do simple, fundamental things that make us uniquely human. Fire, as much as any other single invention or advancement, is what separates us from other primates. It, along with clothing, kept us warm so we could stop growing hair. It enabled us to cook food, thereby expanding our diets and allowing for greater diversity and abundance in what we could eat. It provided relative safety and security at night so that we could sleep.

And now we are forgetting how to make it.

That led me to wonder, "What else are we forgetting how to do?"

Everyone is looking for a guide book on how to live a balanced, happy life. We buy self-help books, we go to seminars, we seek the advice of strangers, and, perhaps above all else, we look to the heavens for answers.

We read the Bible, Koran, Torah, the Vedas and countless other spiritual sacred texts. We believe, because we are told every day, that one of these books holds the key to happiness and joy -- even everlasting life and glory.

The follower of each sect will often hold firm to the belief that theirs is the only correct, true, or righteous path to heaven, enlightenment, happiness, nirvana, salvation, etc.

But what if all you seek is a guidebook on day to day living in this crazy, ever-changing world of ours?




In the past, the existence of religions made sense. People needed a way to explain the inexplicable and, more importantly, a way to convince their fellow humans to live a certain way: Be nice to each other. Don't kill anybody. Don't touch the skin of a dead pig -- it's unclean. These were things that had to be spelled out in simple language that everyone could understand.

Increasingly however, the dogmas and rituals that go along with most organized religions make less and less sense to more and more people. This is because most of the teachings are 2,000 or more years old. The only reason it took us this long to, at least partially, shake off the smothering blanket of religious dogmas is that we all belong to societies that were founded by the purveyors of those religions and their dogmas.

What we need is a place where you can get simple, actionable advice on how to live your life in a sustainable, productive, and balanced manner.

Obviously I do not claim to have all the answers. As I have a worthwhile epiphany I will post it here. If you have an answer to a simple everyday problem, please, please, please share. Eventually I hope that this blog becomes a place where we can together create a manual for living a balanced life. We must have the humility to know that we should look to our past to unlock some of the secrets of our future. At the same time we must recognize that this crucial moment in history, a moment when a scientific discovery in Geneva on Tuesday can be shared with a middle school classroom in Kansas City on Thursday, allows us to break free from those parts of our society which simply do not work.

We get to choose which behaviors we want to teach to our children. They will emulate us and pass on the stories we tell them. Will you teach your children how to build a fire, how to wage a war, how to grow a crop, how to responsibly drive a car, how and when to make babies and raise them, how to safely use the internet?

Just like building a fire, these are all things that there is a right way to do. In some cases the right way is to simply stop doing it. This is a place where we can all talk about what those ways are.