Is the city life or suburban life getting you down? Do you dream of wide-open skies or quiet nights in the woods? It’s natural for humans to crave more time with nature, but for some people, the occasional walk in a park or even weekend camping trip just doesn’t do it. If you long to be one with the natural world and leave civilization or at least parts of it behind, there are actually many different ways you can do that.
Become a Park Ranger
One way to immerse yourselves in the outdoors is to take on a job that gets you outside, such as a park ranger. There are also some jobs in the science field that involve primarily working outdoors on research projects. If these kinds of jobs appeal to you, your first step might be going back to school to get a degree. To help pay for your education, you can look to Going Merry scholarships that has information on different grants and scholarships that you could be eligible for.
The Dirtbag Lifestyle
If going back to school isn’t your thing but you’d still like to work outside, consider the dirtbag lifestyle. It might not sound very appealing at a glance, but dirtbag isn’t an insult in this context. It’s just a name people apply to themselves when they are so passionate about an outdoor activity like climbing, hiking, or skiing that they build their entire life around it. This often means spending as much time as possible doing those activities and the rest of the time doing seasonal work, which is often outdoors as well.
Get Into Permaculture
Maybe dropping everything to make a successful career change or leaving it all behind to climb mountains until you can’t any longer is still a little extreme for what you have in mind. Another possibility is getting into permaculture, which can be a full-time job in some cases but can also just be a consuming hobby if you’d rather keep it as such. Exactly what permaculture is can be hard to define depending on who you’re talking to but think of it as a way of using the land sustainably to grow food and other useful items.
Significantly, you do not have to own a large piece of land to practice permaculture. You can even do it from a city apartment with container plants and window boxes. There are forums, web pages, podcasts and many other resources that can help you get started, and it’s a great way to start interacting with nature in a more meaningful way.
Go Off the Grid
It’s a little extreme, but there still is the possibility of going off the grid entirely, creating systems that allow you to be entirely or almost entirely independent and live off the land. Some people do this partially, some do it temporarily, while others embrace it for a lifetime. Perhaps surprisingly, some people do it and record their lifestyle online, via videos, blogs and social media, so if you’re interested in what it takes, you can find plenty of resources on how to get started and what it’s really like.
