outdoors club

the journey

I was brainstorming for an essay.

I talked so much I had to transcribe it.

It sounded so good I felt compelled to give it to you.

Without further ado, here it is.

---

There aren’t many activities in which you get to appreciate the beauty that is nature, brave bus fires, and canoe across Catalina Island with some very interesting people. Boy Scouts is really something else.

Then I quit.

Yeah, that oddly specific sentence detailed just some of my experiences in the activity. Considering it sounds so amazing, “why the heck did I quit?” In 10th grade, I wasn’t a fan of incessant paperwork, particularly the type that Boy Scouts had me fill out. And while me, the one you’re listening to now, would have been totally fine with it, the guy two years ago wasn’t down. So I quit. My hikes were reduced to walks. ones which my brother, front and center, would end after the first five minutes, a sort of family tradition.

On one of these walks, I started thinking. I started feeling. I started sighing. I couldn’t understand what made me quit Boy Scouts. I couldn’t understand why I left. I began remembering all of the beautiful events that I had went on with people, with friends, with all of my Fremont Asians, and I missed it. I missed those campouts, I missed those hikes. Even the parents who sometimes were annoying, I missed them too. But I didn’t miss the paperwork. I didn’t miss the formalities. I didn’t miss that ‘necessary’ process. Because it felt unnecessary to me. With the mind of a “I want to create a business” -er, I figured, well, the only logical thing to do was start something myself. So I spent 10 hours looking for a domain name, found a VP, got 10 people to sign up, and started Outdoors Club.

What I realized was it wasn’t just in Boy Scouts that people should experience these experiences through. Our society is built off the predicated understanding that boredom shan’t exist. That assumption that is drilled into us as we grow up, creates a friction towards being in our own company for too long. Many of us revert to social media, to video games to aspects of entertainment that prevent us from having to be alone. To be bored. To be present. There had to be a way to get away from it all. One that I knew it was difficult to make happen, but the only way it would be possible was if it was done with people. Outdoors Club was founded on the assumption that people like people, people have friends, and people enjoy getting out with their friends. And if we could trick them into getting outside with their friends, they could experience feelings and experience experiences similar to the ones I had had. Ones that allowed them to clear their mind, to relax, and to truly exist. And while at a lot of the colleges I’ve looked at, and a lot of colleges I’ve seen, there are many outdoors based programs. Programs which give kids all the tools they need to get outside, to go on events, to go on retreats (almost mini ones to set them up for real company ones). But there was nothing like this in the very progressive bay area in which I live in. And I found that problematic. This stuff exists higher up, so why can’t we catch kids sooner? And why does it need to be in the form of a paperwork driven activity? Why can’t it be in a form where kids can be lazy? All they have to do is try not to be.

So it was officiated as a school club in order to get students to join and it began in quarantine. It started off with something of a bang, I would say. We got around 15 to 20 people to join our initial meeting. And I talked about its purpose, similar to what I just did in the past couple paragraphs. Students got pretty excited. My friends were pretty stoked to get this going. So we booked a hike and we were off to Coyote Hills the next weekend. We arrived. We got whatever food instruments we needed. We got our water and embarked on a journey with each other. Somehow, every Outdoors Club hike I’ve ever gone on has been the most beautiful hike ever, something about nature knowing we’re coming or just nature always delivering but this was astonishingly beautiful. This was the first. The sun glowed. It set. It was purple, red and yellow. Every color on the spectrum. It was mind blowingly beautiful, mind numbingly even. It was windy on the top of a mountain. I went up on a cliff I had never scaled, I took photos with my friends, I talked to my friends. I experienced a form of connection with my friends which was beyond the surface level of of understanding of friendship. I got to know them better. And it seems so did they. Shortly after coming back from this trip, I got a text from a friend.

“I had so much fun today. I hadn’t been this happy in so long. I’m almost in tears. That’s how happy I am.”

“Okay, so I’m never stopping this ever, then.”

That’s the first thing that came to my head. I was so moved. So touched that something as simple as a hike, at least it felt simple to me, could impact a human like that. So many people haven’t gotten the chance to experience real connection. And that first step my friend took really played out to be something beautiful for her. In the next year, many more people took that same first step. One of them particularly being Charles, a friend of mine, who was learning what it meant to take care of himself. To prioritize his health. I became really good friends with him. Through our experiences we really connected. A couple months after our first hike together, we went on a bike ride. A 16 mile one. And he gave me a note. This note detailed how my example… I, I motivated him. I was a figure he could look at to understand the true positive implications of prioritizing yourself. I became a mentor, I helped him continue. On his journey, I validated what he was looking for.

Now, this discussion isn’t just about I. It’s about the people I was around. The people in my community of James Logan High School and the people in my broader community of the Silicon Valley. I took people on runs. Friends and I organized gatherings. We did everything as much as we could, given the state of the world. Built toolkits for people who wanted to build their own chapters. Built systems in which people could experience these feelings throughout the world.

For me, community isn’t just the 30 people I know. It’s the 300,000 high school students around the world (fact check that for me ;). Every single student deserves to have the feelings to experience those experiences again, that I and my friends got to do through this organically created activity.

Learning to appreciate the world, to experience the world, to disconnect out of favor of connecting is so key to living beautifully. I don’t plan on stopping. This activity is one of the many I plan on continuing throughout my life. Because as I mentioned earlier, and everyone is deserving of these feelings. It’s my duty to help provide them to people.

It took a walk to start Outdoors Club.

It took a singular human just interested in possibly helping and having a good time with his friends.

It doesn’t take much to start a revolution, but it does take something to follow through.

And I plan on following through.