Wanderlust
Monthly Feature, May, 2016.
By James Holcomb
Wanderlust
Monthly Feature, May, 2016.
By James Holcomb

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

Image I have never been a materialistic person. I find no joy in accumulating material goods. Instead, I find great personal satisfaction in helping others find happiness. Like many others, I have endured hardships. My father once told me that "it is not what you have, but what you do with it." I live my life by that quote; I strive to do everything I can with the experience that I have to help others achieve happiness. And as many of us know, it can be elusive. During my time in high school, I never considered myself to be happy. Though I thought I had everything I could possibly want, I was somehow not satisfied. It was difficult to really enjoy many aspects of the life I was living. These thoughts clouded my mind until I began to believe that there was nothing that could ever bring me peace.

In time, the fault in my way of thinking became clear and I rebuilt the way I lived. I put aside my phone and laptop, the distractions which had obscured my view of reality for so long. Quite alone, I wandered into the woods behind my home. I found an oak tree with branches grasping up at the sunlight, sunlight that was struggling to reach the forest floor. I sat in this tree for hours, contemplating my life up until this point. I attempted to decipher the true meaning of happiness, and as the tree and I grew older, I began to understand what happiness means. For me, happiness, like peace or faith, is a path rather than a destination. It is a seed of passion that grows. Once you find your passion, you feed it with aspects of life that you live and love. If you indulge your passion with love and hard work, then happiness will grow inside you until it fills your very being.

Since I discovered my passion for helping others, my power has moved in the direction of hope. It occurred to me that if I found happiness through experiencing nature, perhaps others could too. With this idea in mind, I set out to achieve my conscious endeavor. Thoughts brewed within my head, ideas took shape, and a question grew - how can I combine my love of nature with my desire to help others? It occurred to me that I could achieve the goals of preserving the beauty of the natural world and of helping others by demonstrating the therapeutic power of nature. I tested this idea by telling a close friend of mine, who had struggled for years with clinical depression, to take some time to wander through nature. He was skeptical at first, telling me that if science could not produce a pill that could help him, there was nothing that nature could do. Since then, he has taken time out of his everyday life to wander and take in what the natural world has to offer. He tells me that this brings him a sense of peace that no medicine could ever bring him. Knowing that I helped someone achieve happiness, even if only for a few hours, is both humbling and rewarding. I believe that if more people followed this train of thought, and if more people embraced their conscious endeavor, it would truly help in our efforts to care for the world and live more sustainably.


Image James Holcomb is a recent graduate of Franklin Pierce University with a degree in Environmental Studies and Anthropology. He also received a sustainability certificate from Franklin Pierce and intends to use this knowledge to incite change in the world around him.



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