Last month I accompanied my daughter Yael's 5th grade class on an overnight trip to the Haw River State Park and Environmental Education Center. After a day of exploring the outdoors and playing games in a steady rain, we had gone through all our dry and clean clothes, and were sitting together in the gathering pit for a closing event.

One of the resident leaders congratulated us for being such troopers. He said, "Some people think that if they're not in a dry, 72 degree environment, they're not OK. Some people think that they need to be clean to be OK. We need to remember that being a little cold sometimes is OK. Being a little hot sometimes is OK. Being dirty is OK. Remember: DIRT DOESN'T HURT!"

That short statement helped a lot of kids reframe their experiences of the previous 18 hours. It helped me, actually. When I look honestly at my assumptions about comfort and the outdoors, I find a lot of intolerance for discomfort. 

Jon Hinds, founder of the Monkey Bar Gymnasium in Madison, Wisconsin, has a powerful rule about exercise: "Make yourself vulnerable to the elements."

Now, I don't want to get all kung fu on you, but there is something to not letting our kids and ourselves get "soft" by pampering ourselves with perfectly controlled physical environments all the time. Knowing that we can deal with the unexpected, with physical discomfort, with dirt, with the world as it is and not as we humans attempt to engineer it - that's heady stuff that can really build self-confidence.

The look on my son Elan's face as he engages raw nature is so different from when he's inside building with Legos or watching a video. There's something elemental going on, something that's feeding parts of him that can't be reached or nurtured any other way:

Let's not let our own obsessions with mechanical fitness (gym, treadmill, yoga routine, etc.) interfere with our connection to the natural world. Yes, it's not always comfortable. Heck, it's not always perfectly safe. But it is what it is, and it made us what we are. And it can continue to do so if we will only let it.