If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Interesting philosophical question.

Yesterday I read a quote by the late Christopher McCandless that appeared on a Facebook post.

It inspired me to dig deeper.

McCandless was a backpacker who donned the name Alexander Supertramp. He shunned all materialistic excesses of society and made his way to the Alaska wilderness.

He even disposed of his prior identity and never told a soul where he was going.

For his family, he just up and vanished.

He thought that happiness, or ultimate freedom, could be found in the wild.

Living off the land.

His adventure is documented in a book and movie, both entitled In the Wild.

McCandless lived in an abandoned bus that had been converted into a hunting shelter for 112 days before succumbing to fatigue and starvation from lack of available food.

He thought that he was cut off from any means of return by the rain-swollen river, but in reality there was a hand-operated tram that he could have used to cross only a quarter mile away.

So, you see, his isolation existed mainly inside his head…

but that’s exactly what he wanted.

In the movie, one of the last entries in his diary, scribbled with shaky hands inside the warmth of his sleeping bag…the place where he was found some time later, dead, decaying and weighing less than 70 pounds…was this…

Happiness is only real when shared.

That one made me think.

For the last decade I’ve been on my own personal odyssey.

Like McCandless, I grew tired of the rules. Of the norms that society, at least the one I came from, placed on me.

So, in not quite so dramatic a form as McCandless, I decided to make my own personal escape.

A search for happiness…and freedom.

McCandless made his discovery a little too late in the game.

I hope it’s not too late for me.

He had his adventures, as have I…but what we were both searching for never came in those moments of extreme isolation.

Rather they were found in the company of those we care for.

I believe we humans were created to be social creatures.

We don’t function so well in isolation. Maybe that’s why solitary confinement is such a dreaded form of torture.

We were created to love and to be loved.

So, as an alternative to the tree question, I would like to pose a different philosophical conundrum …

Sometimes life’s lessons come very hard.