231 – Plan Your Next Adventure! - a podcast by Alf Herigstad

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Plan Your Next Adventure!I don’t know about all of you out there, but I am in full blown summer schedule with everything now.  You may have noticed that I have only been releasing episodes on Friday lately, that is evidence that I am super, super busy with the things that summer is demanding of me.
Besides the farm, and our property, and relatives visiting and events of all kinds to attend one thing that has had me incredibly busy lately is that I am preparing to go on an adventure.  That’s right—an adventure.The adventure I’m going on is my wife and I are bringing my 81 year old father and his 83 year old brother to the Burning Man festival in Nevada.  I’m calling it the generational legacy tour of 2017.
There are lots of different opinions out there about burning man, and there are still some people that don’t even know what it is.  Some people think it’s a den of iniquity where the devil’s minions gather.  Other people think it’s just a bunch of dirty hippies running around naked and doing drugs.  Other folks think it’s awesome and some people actually go to appreciate the colossal art built in the middle of the desert.  Some people go to hear the lectures about all kinds of amazing things.Well, I have been to burning man once in 2015.  From my experience burning man can be all of these things, or none of these things.  I found that it’s really up to the person going—you get exactly the kind of experience at burning man that you design for yourself.  Just like in life.
There are around 80,000 people at this festival.  They build an actual city in the middle of a dry lakebed called Black Rock City, and then they tear it down.  Burning man has a “leave no trace” ethos.  After it’s over no trace is left, no garbage, no cigarette butts, nothing.  That in itself is really quite remarkable. Like any city there are parts of it that I have no interest in, parts that I will avoid.  There are other parts that are amazing though.
There are several reasons I like going to burning man. One is simply the challenge of it.  You can’t buy any food there.  All of your sustenance must be brought with you for the entire week.  You are in an extreme environment with blistering heat and cool nights, I’ve seen 70 mile per hour winds there, and dust storms.  It’s very much like camping on the moon if it had oxygen.  The dirt is fine as talcum powder, nothing grows there and there aren’t even any insects. I love seeing what that extreme environment does to peoples imagination and ingenuity.  People come up with truly amazing ways to not only survive, but to thrive out there.
The other reason I like going is to witness the raw humanity.  There is every kind of human you could imagine in this place, from all over the world.  The labels we are so used to in everyday life seem to fall away.  There are rich people and poor people, people of every diverse lifestyle and every socio-economic strata—but they all get along.  They all bring something unique, and special to this common, extreme environment.I also enjoy marveling at the things people have built.  Not just the art, but the structures as well, and the amazing vehicles driving around in the desert.  As a life long student of humanity, there isn’t a better place I know of to go and just witness humans, being humans.
I wanted to take my dad and uncle to this event because it’s a way for me to provide them with an experience unlike any they have ever had in their 8 plus decades of life on this planet.  Isn’t that what life is kind of about?  Gathering experiences and doing things you have never done before.  These guys are in their 80’s and they have done so many things and been so many places in all that time.  I know they have never done anything like this before though, and that’s why I felt it was important.That’s why I’m talking about this today, because I believe that a key component of being a man...

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