(This article originally appeared on TasteTablet.)
Take a moment to shut yourself in a windowless room in your home. Turn out the lights, and sit quietly. What do you see? What do you hear? Maybe there are shadows dancing in the strip of light under the door. Maybe you hear cars honking, toddlers giggling. Wherever you are, I can bet that your answers probably aren’t simply “nothing at all.”
I was in grade school when I was dragged into my first cavern. Donning a hardhat bedazzled with stickers, I trudged through the tall grass in the pouring rain, mud sloshing under my feet and a pout on my face. My parents were lifelong spelunkers—well, they’d demand you used the proper term, “cavers”—so there was no getting out of it. I descended into a hole in the ground somewhere in the mountains of western Virginia wondering if I’d ever see the sun again.
My first thought: that cave was filthy. Tiny streams ran down the rocky walls into puddles of muck, and spiders lurked in the shadows. I was forced to duck and crawl, and soon my sky blue coveralls had transformed into a brownish grey. Huffing and puffing, I slithered along a narrow passage behind my father, unable to see anything except the bottom of his boots and the creepy cave crickets mere inches from my face.
Eventually, our tunnel grew into an enormous room with walls made of shimmering white rock and a thousand stalactite chandeliers, grown over tens of thousands of years. I bowed my head, glued my arms to my sides, and froze, determined not to be the bull in the china shop that might undo nature’s delicate work.
In that room, where we could nearly hear our breaths echoing off the walls, our party turned off our headlamps one by one until we were surrounded by pure darkness. Reaching my fingertips out into the unknown, I was met with nothing but cool air. My ears strained for something. My eyes bulged from their sockets, seeking stimuli. Even under four layers of clothing, the hairs on the back of my neck stood as a chill gripped my body.
Later that evening, after the clouds had cleared from the sky, I sat at the edge of a nearby creek, smiling at the playful tadpoles who darted between pebbles. I had entered that cave a stubborn young girl with a phobia of the outside and a vocabulary comprised primarily of synonyms for “no.” Several years after that trip, I would go on to grumble incessantly as I hiked 12 miles on a rainy day in the Grand Tetons with my parents. It seemed I was still that same girl, until suddenly, in between bursts of precipitation, a majestic moose crossed our path. I laughed with glee, broke out my camera, and snapped away. Something, somewhere inside me, had changed.
Last year, Flurry Analytics found that the average American was spending 177 minutes on a mobile device and 168 minutes watching television each day. In today’s world, filled with smartphone notifications, Netflix, and a never-ending supply of download sites, we don’t really know silence. We don’t know blackness apart from the glow of LED lights. But sometimes, going off the grid is what it really takes to see the magic in the little things around us.
Since that dreary day in the cave, I have seen the geysers at Yellowstone, stood on the edge of a volcanic crater in Hawaii, swum underneath waterfalls in Costa Rica, walked on a beach of mystical “ooid” sand on a remote island of the Bahamas, climbed rocks in the Nevada desert, and met black bears in the Appalachians. Off the beaten path and often involving minor injuries or the loss of a shoe, these adventures would not have been acceptable to the old me.
Simply seeing nothing at all, just for a moment, opened my eyes to everything. It made it hard not to stop and smell the flowers planted along the sidewalk in the busy city or watch a chipmunk rooting through the leaves outside my window. The more I took in, the more I wanted to savor it all—and save it all for generations to come. Perhaps it was in my genes all along, or perhaps it was that fateful day caving that set me out on a lifelong path to protect our wild lands and fellow creatures.
For just a moment, forget about the clacking of the keyboard and the anchor on the evening news and embrace simplicity. You may not have a cave, but you do have the outdoors—maple trees swaying in the wind, a songbird calling to his lover, a foraging muskrat. There isn’t any way to quantify the enormous value of being disconnected from the hustle and bustle and re-connecting with our roots. Of course, you might not transform into an environmental crusader as I did, and that’s okay. But you will discover something magical within yourself, and as long as you hold onto that, your eyes will never close again.