THE CAMP HABIT
If there were no such thing as habit, life would be nothing but a
perpetual beginning and recommencing over and over again. All that we do
or think marks us with its imprint, leaving behind it a tendency--a
tendency towards repetition is the beginning of habit, and because of it
we can get the camp habit just as we can get any other habit. The
instinct to repeat our camping out of doors gradually grows stronger. At
last, scarcely conscious of the existence of the demand, we have come to
feel that we cannot pass our holiday in any other way. The first camping
experience stands out in bold relief because it is new. As we live into
it, its first impressions are lost. And it is at this moment, if we are
made of the right stuff and have in us the right longings and needs,
that we begin to have the camp habit.
Just as with people, maybe we scarcely realize how much it means to us.
But let us stop to think about it, let us give this good camp habit a
full opportunity if we can in our lives. Already the camp habit has
become a need, almost an imperious demand. We feel that once in so often
it must be satisfied and in the splendid grip of this good habit we make
way for it. Never let us become dull to any of its values. Never let us
forget, however shot with black and white it may be, even gray at times,
the difficulties of camping may make life seem--never let us forget the
treasures that it pours in upon us and the ways in which the camp habit
serves us.
It is a sad and a great truth which perhaps women and girls have not yet
fully realized, that the whole manner of our body, of our souls is
controlled by the goodness, or the badness of our habits, our moral
character, our physical temperament. There is a sort of natural
medicine, raising what is not good inevitably up to what is better. That
is what the camp habit does for us, raising what is not healthy, not
strong, not sane, not joyous, not self-reliant up to what is strong,
healthy, joyous and full of self-control. Is not this alone sufficient
reason for giving the camp habit once in so often full sway in our
lives? What better could we do than, in order to re-establish ourselves,
to claim again the wise big relationships of out-of-doors and a thousand
and one little and big friends whom we can find there?
Bad habits are thieves, for they take away our energies, our abilities,
our joys. And the indoor habit is a thief. It shortens life, it takes
away from health, it saps energies, it dilutes joys, it makes foggy
heads and punky morals. The sane girl will get out of doors every
opportunity instead of spending her time in a hot room, playing cards,
or eating stuff that is not fit to put into the human stomach or
flirting with boys, who if they are the right sort of boys, would much
prefer, too, to be out of doors. Good habits, like this camp habit are
benefactors, great philanthropists; they strengthen us and they give us
more energy. They increase our ability, they multiply our joys compound
interest-wise. Good habits are careful accountants and every day or
every year as it may be, they put the interest of strength, of
intelligence, of joy, in our hands to be used as we think best. The camp
habit wisely used, obliges us to open our eyes and see life more truly.
It obliges us to lift our own weight, take our part in things, that part
may be washing dishes or it may be turning griddle cakes,--it forces us
to know ourselves better and it gives us more power to control
ourselves. The camp habit--get it quickly if you haven’t it
already--assures us of good health and success where, for example, the
indoor habit has brought us nothing but ill health and failure. It is a
habit worth while getting, isn’t it?
A good many of us know ourselves, such as we are, pretty well and we
feel that we do not want to know ourselves any better. Things are bad
enough as they are. Yet if we can’t have a more intimate knowledge of
ourselves, if we don’t arrange our lives better, if we don’t plan for
the future more carefully, what are our lives likely to be like when the
curtain goes down? How are we ever going to take the proverbial ounce of
prevention if we are not certain to a fraction what it is we must
prevent? Camp is a splendid opportunity to think a little about those
things of which we have been afraid to think. It is a good opportunity
to meditate, a friendly world to which to go to know ourselves better.
It is an old saying that the first step towards the recovery of health
is to know yourself ill. In that great out-of-door world which our
American camp life represents it is easier to find ourselves morally
than it is indoors, we get more help for one thing. It is almost an
instinct in great trouble or bewilderment or difficulty to escape into
the out-of-door world, to get back to earth and to ask from the great
mother those counsels we hear dimly or indifferently indoors.
Wisdom will not be found in one camp holiday or in fifty or in a
lifetime even. But it is rather strange, isn’t it, that the person whom
we know least is so frequently ourselves? We know very well that the
most learned man or woman is not the one whose head is stuffed with
information, is not necessarily the conspicuous or famous man or woman,
but is, rather, the human being who knows himself. And this human being
may be not our teacher, but our janitor or a nurse who takes care of
the baby or that fellow who seems so simple, the guide who has our
camping trip in charge. Indeed, there is scarcely a class of men who
seem in better control of themselves and who have a better working
knowledge of themselves and others than the highest type of guide. All
the associations of that great out-of-door life, its demands, its
privations, its sudden needs, its great silence, its dumb creatures, its
wonderful beauty, have taught the man of the woods a wisdom no school,
no university, can offer merely through its curriculum. We can’t realize
too early how well worth while that wisdom is for every girl to have.
Not a thing of book learning, but a power that makes one truthful with
oneself, eager to acknowledge what is bad and to change it. Frank,
courageous, tried in commonplace wisdom, and with a knowledge of other
human beings.
There is one kind of idea--and it is worth while meditating in the woods
on the leverage power of even one very little idea--that can always be
found out of doors. I mean a healthful idea, the kind of thought that
makes us stand straighter, that strengthens the muscles of our backbone,
that makes us act as if we were what we wish to be. There is no other
force in the world that can so readily straighten out a crooked boy or a
crooked girl as this same Dr. Dame Nature.