On Sunday, I decided to take part in the guided hike around Fall Creek Gorge. This hike made me realize how close I truly live to a very beautiful Gorge. If you walk a little past where all the fraternity and sorority houses are, you come across the Fall Creek Gorge. An interesting fact that I learned about all the gorges in Ithaca is during Pangea Ithaca was situated on the equator. This means that the climate mimicked the climate of a tropical rainforest. Additionally, this meant that the coniferous trees that we have today were once more tropical. However, once the tectonic plates began shifting and North America collided with another continent, we got the formation of all the gorges in Ithaca. This truly mesmerized me because I think as humans we are very focused on the present and the future. We take very little consideration for the past, but there is that famous saying “the future influences the present just as much as the past.” The past influenced the landscape that we have today just as in future events we will have continuous erosion and movement of sediment that will once again change the way that the landscape looks. This really made me realize that nothing is permanent. Everything is constantly changing, which means that we should learn to not dwell on the negatives or the things that we can’t control. Instead, we should learn to accept our experiences, the good and the bad, because they are shaping us into who we are today just as the gorges were shaped into what they are today from the events that occurred in the past.