In The Rappahannock News, you are outside yourself.

[O]utdoors where the Boy Scouts took me — in the woods or on the rivers — I began to fashion an identity beyond myself, anchored in a sense of time and place. The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a word for this — Dasein — “being there.” Humans are not simply isolated subjects (“I think, therefore I am”). Rather, we truly exist only in relation to the rest of the world. That’s when we’re most alive.