With or Without a Flashlight

“What is that? Hurry, hurry, hurry turn on the flashlight I said to Michael who was almost asleep and to myself, too stricken with fear to find it in the dark when it had mysteriously disappeared. It felt like the climax to a suspenseful movie, where you are on the edge and holding your breath. Don’t move, did you hear that? It sounds like everyone below us is eating everyone around them!” Night blindness can leave you uniquely vulnerable as we discovered. We were staying in a jungle lodge with only paper thin boards separating us from ‘them’. The Amazon’s sudden, inexplicable sounds can be terrifying at night, especially the first one and, well the rest of the nights as well.

Life in the jungle is immediate in every sense of the word. It certainly is not a ride in Disneyland even though you want yourself to believe it. Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey – The River of Doubt describes the jungle so vividly, “So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being…the screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathom canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.”

Those are the perfect words to describe what we felt when we experienced the Amazon Jungle on trip last September. We had excellent guides who knew exactly what to do in every situation. We realized we knew very little about real survival. It was also amazing to us how easy it was to let go of the stresses of our jobs and lives when we found ourselves on high alert to our immediate surroundings.

We are sure you are now asking yourselves, why go there – there are safer, more relaxing places to go on vacation. That’s true, there are, but how alive do you feel everyday in your safe routines? This trip heightened our senses, forced us to face our fears and gave us an extreme view of different cultures and survival. It was exhilarating. Just as Theodore Roosevelt realized the unexpected magnitude of their trip and how unprepared they were, we too were in the same dugout boats they used back then and still use today. BIG REVELATION: Without our guide, I’m not sure we still would have a chance of surviving by ourselves in the Amazon.

Despite all of the surprises in the jungle, the opportunities of fringe travel, as I call it, increases the opportunity you have to really live in the moment. These life skills sharpen your senses and help you operate in the world on a different level. My personal experience in the jungle gave me a gift of a new kind of empathy about perspective. Rather than using a negative judgment about something, understand the principles of the context in which something exists rather than judgment based perhaps solely on fear. This new metaphor of being in the jungle is a new perspective of surviving and not at the lowest level in Maslow’s hierarchy but in self-actualization.

Maslow learned to distinguish “special talent creativeness” from “self-actualizing (SA) creativeness," which springs more directly from the personality, and showed itself in the ordinary affairs of daily life. Self-actualizing humans “do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it or try to make believe it is really known…they do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.”

This year, I believe we have all been provided these kinds of opportunities, especially in the economic conditions and the uncertainty in which we live. I have used these lessons from the jungle in business to help focus on being in the moment by visualizing the bigger picture while examining immediate things going on underfoot. The corporate world is a lot more primal than you could have imagined!