#walesadventure
I once heard that to enjoy the wild, sometimes you must succumb to boredom, and it’s kind of true. In a contemporary society, so full of distractions replacing actions, boredom can seem like a radical thing.
5 minutes spare? Check your phone. Waiting for the bus? Check your phone. Having a lie in? Can’t sleep? Bored? Check your phone.⠀
Never for one moment in this technologically enhanced culture do we need to suffer boredom when there’s a million things to do at the flick of a screen, yet these things serve no purpose other than to pass time. They have no meaning, they create no lasting memories, challenge or stimulate us. Often we don’t notice the voices in our phone screens, billions of them chiming in at once, how loud they call until we shut them off.⠀
Silence.⠀
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Our nights camping in the valleys of North Wales were a deliberate motion to disconnect ourselves for a few days; without even a lick of signal we were forced to make our own fun.⠀
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Camping in the wilds of Snowdonia with nothing but a tent and a car to hold our supplies forced us to live deliberately, in a way that not even our van enables us to. For the bare minimum of comfort there’s the arduous process of setting up a tent, inflating a mattress, collecting firewood, coaxing a fire into life and preparing a meal on its white hot coals. By the time all this is done, and we’ve spent the best part of an afternoon seeking out a camp spot, there’s little else we want to do than fall into bed beneath the stars and soak in the absolute silence around us.
Without the temptations of TV, or the endless scroll of social media at our fingertips our thoughts can breathe, and by physically distancing ourselves from our problems for a while we can gain a deeper perspective. The picturesque valleys of North Wales, crowded with flocks of sheep and little else, offered us the one thing we’ve been lacking these past months: solitude.
