Somerset Folk

This year I have been through many ups and downs as an ice student, and winter camping was an experience that gave me both of those. Winter camping changed my perspective on myself, my life as a student, and my Canadian identity

when going into winter camping I had a bit of a far better idea of what it would hold because I went multiple times before with york as an outers club member, however, I had no idea how different this experience would be from my others. For starters we were out in the cold for a WHOLE WEEK as opposed to the two days I was used to, and let me tell you a week in the cold is nothing to take lightly it includes many, many layers and many hours of defrosting your feet once you arrive home.

All joking aside I would like to talk about an event during winter camping that changed my perspective on myself, and my character. A quinsy is an igloo sort of building you can make from snow while camping. It’s great and warm to sleep in and it should hold up all night if you build it right, and let me tell you building it is not an easy process! It entailed a lot of snow shovelling, then snow squishing, and then snow digging. Anyways when the guide showed us how to make the quinzy I thought no way am I ever going to be able to get that done. However, once we got working and started the building we were able to see that we were overreacting a bit and that it is actually a fun process. After a lot of hard work, we were able to be the first group done and we also had the largest quinzee. This changed my perspective of myself. Never before had I had an experience like that where it was either get it done or sleep on the street there was no easy way out (it wasn’t really like that but still very stressful!). Anyways once I got started I realized that my procrastination does me a huge disservice because I can never know how difficult something will be until I start it, and the only way to get something done is to work hard at it.

Next, I would like to talk about an experience during winter camping that changed my perspective as a student.

At first, when we arrived at the camp we were able to try out many different and cool activities, one of these being our thinking traps. This was an activity where we were able to look at many different cards of bad thinking traps that may be impairing us from living our best lives. Once we found the thinking traps that resonated with us the most we were able to talk about them with our group and come up with ways to stop the trap from happening. After doing this our group was shown how to put your hand over a mousetrap without getting it caught. We then put our thinking traps under the mousetrap and watched it snap shut just after you took your hand away from it in the nick of time. During this exercise, I learnt that a thinking trap of mine is minimizing this trap is where someone often plays down the importance of things. For me, this means that when I make an achievement or if I do something right that I have trouble celebrating it because I often play down the importance of things and I am always thinking of what’s next or what I haven’t done. This changed my perspective on myself as a student because I learned that I need to celebrate the smaller victories at school, in order to be more positive.

Finally, an experience that changed my perspective on myself as a Canadian was when we did the Inuit games during this we were able to play and experience exciting Inuit sports and activities. There were many fun games to play, and I’ll admit I was terrible at most of them, but despite that, they were still very fun and engaging. Through taking part of this I learned that being a Canadian doesn't mean just knowing my country's past and acknowledging it and respecting our first peoples, but engaging myself in the culture, and customs of the indigenous people.