An actual frontier is as close to ‘nowhere’ as one can get. Nowhere is the literal translation of Thomas Moore’s ‘Utopia’ – a word he invented by combining two Greek words meaning ‘no’ and ‘place’. Unlike his city where the streets were paved with gold, a frontier tends toward being transcendently beautiful (unless one is in a pestilential swamp with 10,000 beautiful insects seeking to devour lol). A frontier (not in the Euro meaning of ‘border) is in-itself a place so great to be in one feels it to be Utopia in a sense; though one requiring periodic work to keep from freezing, dying of thirst or being eaten by bear or drowned by a giant wave capsizing a boat (the ocean is a kind of frontier). So there isn’t really an ideal day. Instead a frontier is normally ideal when there is an absence of deleterious challenges of myriad varieties that arise.
Frontiers aren’t about relationships Frontiers are more like an environment- water that a fish swims in for example. They are fundamentally different from other environments people live in. If you lived in one a while you would understand that. They are of course rapidly disappearing until off-whirld becomes common. Ideal relationships are something else.
An actual frontier is a milieu; it is a sea one sails. A captain never really rests because the sea never really rests. Sailing solo is interesting yet sailing with a partner is much easier. Perhaps imagining a combat soldier in the field (I haven’t been one) is better for a comparison. One is physically fit and tries to remain that way, yet nothing changes at day or at night- instead one has one’s own center or calm in the midst of the storm. Tomorrow is a continuation of today. It is the eternal now day or night.
The content of what comprises the day changes- some days have snow, wind or cold; heat thirst or an abundance of good things. Yet the perceptions and experience of what is actual is always somewhat real and phenomenal in a frontier- and nature in itself is generally beautiful everywhere except for the primitive and fundamental evils that exist in it too. If one has a gangrenous limb for instance, and then leprosy followed, that would be painful, debilitating, ugly and concerning- and very strange. One would have the despair that is the sickness unto death perhaps as Kierkegaard wrote. A lion eating an animal alive might be unpleasant to watch and not so beautiful- yet landscapes and flora are at least generally aesthetically wonderful- it is the devil in some of the details that brings it to be a bad experience. The good of frontiers is higher than that of urban life, and I suppose the bad is comparable, yet possibly urbanity has greater bad than nature- people can cause a lot of evil. Being eaten by a bear, crocodile, and/or shark (or Jeff Dalmer in a town), is pretty bad though.
A wilderness has a surfeit of good- just look at the forest and the trees, or the water and clouds. One likes to credit God with an incredible construction; the complexity in a forest is stimulating for mind- and so healthy in the midst of all of that oxygen. In a rain forest even the ground is alive with a kind of moss- life is everywhere. Life in a building is a radically simpler environment regarding stimuli from smells to sights, structural complexity, sounds and motion- it dulls a brain. Sheetrock and paint and maybe a carpet is not like a wilderness forest at all lol
