On "breathing spaces in a society increasingly holding its breath"

Longreads photo credit (link to one essay from book)

I've been reading "Erosion: Essays of Undoing" by activist/academic Terry Tempest Williams.  It contains a long interview with activist Tim DeChristopher who was about to go to jail for disrupting a land sale of oil and gas rights.  

He talks about how he needed to get away from society to discover himself.  

I remember when I was seventeen? Sixteen? I was struggling with all this teenage angst, and being overwhelmed with the world, and I had this feeling that I just wanted to stop for a while so that I could catch up.... [And my mom listened to me and said "You need to go to the wilderness."

We were living in Pittsburgh at the time, and she sent me down to West Virginia, to the Otter Creek Wilderness, in the Monongahela National Forest, which was a place that I'd been to several times.  And I spent eight days alone there.  And it was a really powerful experience that led to my formation as an individual   I mean, it was the first time that I ever experienced myself without any other influences.  Without any cultural influences, any influences from other people.  And it was terrifying to experience that -- I mean, I really thought I was actually going crazy at that point.  But it allowed me to develop that individual identity of who I was without anyone else around.

His modern day vision quest included wilderness and discluded the influence of other things: no TV, Twitter, friends, parents, teachers, bosses.  He pushed the pause button on his "responsibilities." It was a "fast" of society and influence. It's easy to think of Thoreau in his cabin away from town.

We are given our roles by outside entities.  There are normative suggestions about how we live our lives -- from the macro level to the micro level.  The life arc of school, work, marriage, mortgage, babies, retirement, death.  How and when we work.  Our habits of recreation and leisure. Our habits of consumption. Our habits of love and romance.  Like Tim, I have been deeply suspicious of these influences.

What is underneath these influences?  (or, is there any sense to imagine there is a self that resides beneath these influences?  maybe we are influence "all the way down"?  If that's the case, then Tim's fast can at least provide some distance, some perspective.) 

Later in the book, Tempest Williams celebrates the importance of public lands and wilderness.

As westerners, we take our public lands seriously.  We know they are our birthright as American citizens.  They are the lands we graze, mine, drill, frack, log, wander in, and recreate on.  They are also the lands we recognize as our national forests, seashores, wetlands, national parks, and wildlife refuges.  Breathing spaces, I call them, in a society increasingly holding its breath.