INSANITY
Some people feel called to go to Burning Man; others don’t. Part of that calling involves having a degree of insanity in one’s psychological make-up. To some extent one has to be mentally ill to drive out hundreds of miles to a desert with no vegetation frequented by sand storms and help build a city that will only be up for a week! However, once one has been out there a while a stark discrepancy begins to set in between what one believes to be insane and how one actually feels. For example, not having to continually check the time, email, Facebook, twitter, frees up plenty of bandwidth…! For some first time Burners it might actually generate anxiety – their fingers can’t stop twitching, their brains giving the message “how uncivilized!” “How am I going to communicate?” “How do I stay connected?” But as they continue to unplug they often discover that they are actually over-joyed to be living more in the moment, playing, exploring, connecting with the people in their immediate environment as well as the elements. “Wind? Didn’t know there was such a thing!” And then when the event ends and one finds oneself again dealing with traffic, bills, virus attacks, terrorist threats and hundreds of useless emails in one’s Inbox, the brain suddenly goes, “wait a minute, this is insanity!”