Not everyone likes to write, the way I and many of my family members do. However, as you get to know people, you realize everyone seems to have their own form of creative expression. I know a guy who restored an old 1940s pickup truck by meticulously replacing every part with a new part, then painting the truck his favorite color. We had a neighbor who spent endless hours modifying his family’s house and landscaping the yard. When he finally had it all done, they sold the house and moved so that he could start again on another house. Everyone tends to find some activity that allows them to express some creativity. Everyone wants to master some skill, or make something that pleases them or pleases other people.

Why not just exist? Why not sit on the couch and watch TV every spare moment? Wouldn’t it be easier to decide to never engage mentally in any form of creative expression? Wouldn’t it be easier to never make anything, or never master any skills?

I get great pleasure from crafting stories that I hope will entertain people. It is hard work, and each book requires countless hours of effort. I make some money from selling my books, but that is not really the reason I do it. I, like most everyone else, need a form of creative expression, and this is mine.

In solving this mystery, my first thought was that creative expression is an important component of our psychological development when we are children, and therefore we simply continue to like it as we grow older. But there may be more to it than simply holding on to a childhood tendency. It seems to be a universal part of our well-being. Throughout history, people have used dances, chants, pictures, and stories as a part of their healing rituals. Creative expression makes us healthy.

Perhaps a big part of it is that creative expression provides a glimpse into a person’s mind. It is a way of saying this is who I am. Perhaps we want to show the rest of the world who we are, or perhaps we want to discover who we are for ourselves.

Creative expression can be found almost anywhere...

There's an old hanging footbridge in Warsaw, Missouri. We decided to check it out recently, and we noticed an Osprey had built a nest at the very top of one of the supports.

Ospreys are large fish-eating raptors, with a wingspan of about six feet (1.8 meters). Chances are, you have seen an osprey, regardless of where you live. Why? Because the osprey is one of only six birds with a worldwide distribution (except Antarctica). Amazingly, this bird thrives in the warm tropics as well as in cold arctic regions.

See that huge nest the Osprey is sitting on? These birds like to make 'em big! They often add more sticks to their nests every year, and some nests have been reused over and over for up to seventy years. Not by the same bird, though, as ospreys only live to be about ten years old. These stick nests are often two meters across and weigh 300 pounds (135 kg).

I’ve been going to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness since 1986 (and going there with Trish since 1992). Part of the appeal is the hardships involved with a true wilderness experience: portaging your canoe and gear from one lake to the next, cooking meals with minimal equipment, trying to stay dry when the rains come, and keeping the insects from sucking all the blood from your body, to name a few. Dealing with these hardships properly results in an ego boost. They make me feel like I’m Jeremiah Johnson, or at least a version of Jeremiah Johnson who enjoys comfy air mattresses and high-tech footwear.

There is, however, one hardship in the Boundary Waters I do not appreciate, and that hardship is becoming more bothersome as I get older. I’m talking, of course, about the need to crawl out of the tent in the middle of the night to urinate. There, I said it. To pee, to wizz, to take a leak, to micturate. It’s just not fun. There’s all that moaning and groaning to unzip the sleeping bag, trying to put on a pair of wet shoes, unzipping the tent and then zipping it back up to keep the mosquitoes out of the tent, stumbling over rocks and tent cords to move far enough away from the tent, finding a spot where the ground slopes away from your feet so the urine does not flow back onto your shoes (or bare feet), getting the job done while slapping mosquitoes, stumbling back to the tent, unzipping then rezipping the tent door, crawling back into the sleeping bag, turning on a flashlight and methodically killing the mosquitoes that got in during the process, then trying to go back to sleep.

There was a time when I could go all night without doing that. Those days are long gone. Now I have to go through it at least two times per night, sometimes more. The Great Mystery is, why?

My first thought was, this happens to those of us who were troublemakers in our younger days. But I know people who I’m quite sure are 'practically perfect in every way' who still have to pee at night as much as I do. As it turns out, it is not unusual at all. As we age, our bodies produce less of a hormone that helps concentrate urine so that we can hold it until the morning. Also, as we get older, we are likely to have other health issues that make it harder to hold it until morning, such as an enlarged prostate gland (in men) and lowered estrogen (in women), which causes changes in the urinary tract. There are plenty of other things that can cause it too. Bummer. Unfair. But, Trish and I are still going to the Boundary Waters.