Day: March 10, 2020

Back from Nashville and all points Northeast I am reminded of how different life is here than there. I am specifically reminded of how much slower life is there and how few expectations are laid at my feet: Do my chores, write, relax. It was a vacation, and I was not put to work at the level I certainly will be next time, but there were not as many responsibilities flying around my head.

I enjoy the majority of my responsibilities, but truth be told, I have far too many. They chip away at the quality of life, leaving me in a state of near constant motion where there is but a day or two each week to catch my breath.

Still, I can take it. In fact, I feel I have to take it for the next ten years give or take a few months. Once I hit that line I can throttle back. In a dream scenario I’d leave earlier, find my way to a small town as I was in, clear a patch of land, and live off the hard work I’ve accomplished thus far.

I want to be in a situation where I travel with my partner once or twice a year out of the country, and spend maybe two more trips each year visiting the kids wherever they’ve landed. I’d love to see them playing ball in college or doing whatever they wind up doing in the world. I’d love to be able to do that but also be able to focus on doing my own thing with my partner–living our lives fully.

I feel like she’s aboard for some of this ride. Maybe not the crazy stuff I’ve gotten myself into as of late–but who would be. It is a lot. Still, once I figure out that balance, things will go much better.

What do you think about when you are just thinking during the day or in the middle of the night or as the sun falls flat against the horizon? Out here in the woods I had time to ask myself that and found the answer to be as disappointing as possible.

I call them Pillars of Thought. It remains one of the toughest things in my relationship. My Pillars include my relationship but they don’t swirl around it as I suppose they would or perhaps should for everyone. I know my partner thinks about us. Just this morning we were lying in bed and I’d been thinking about us and then my mind shifted away to this blog and what dark places my mind often wanders towards when left alone and just like that she asked me what I was thinking about. It wasn’t us.

It wasn’t anything it should be. I’d been thinking about my job. I’d been working plans in my mind for what I needed to do during the week and the plan to write this very blog. I’d been thinking about my own pillars of thought and what else was up there beyond work. They change. Weight falls heavier on some more than others and then the world shifts and the weight shifts again. There are reasons for all of this. Right now I’m thinking the most about the writing center, the youth football league, Exactly how long and what I need to do till retirement, and ways to see my partner this weekend while I am off with the kids but still spend enough time with the kids to really get my fill of them (they are missed).

I think it is more telling what I am not thinking about. I am not really thinking about classes at all. When I think about stories my mind shifts away from that mental conversation. I’m not thinking about the weekly date night. When I try my mind does what it does with stories. It skitters. Odd isn’t it? The two most important things in my life are the things I’m least able to think long about?

That itself led me down a rabbit hole. I wondered how classes factored into that conversation as well. Here is what I fear is happening. The sports stuff, the work stuff, all of that is pure speculation. There aren’t actionable items rising out of those thought sessions. On the other hand, when I think about stories I think in scenes and moments and conversations. I open the door to that place where the stories live and that world comes streaming in. If I’m just lying there and thinking or in the shower or on the road or just even about my day, I am not able to capture anything that comes flooding through my mental door. I lose it all. The date night stuff is the same way. I’m not capturing these rare ideas of romance and as a result they’ll be lost as well. Sounds like an excuse when I put it on paper, but I’m not much for excuses. I’m for reasons and moving past reasons to understanding how to make things better and how to spend more time thinking about what matters.

When I was a kid—maybe 13? It is hard to say because everything in my childhood feels extremely compressed into the space between the year my father died and the fall I started high school—I went to summer camp for the second time. It was out deep in the woods and I experienced a kind of silence I would not again see for three years and after that not again until college. I kept returning to that silence and stillness of the woods as a touchstone. Each pilgrimage brought me further from the technology of the day and closer to the technology of my mind; to the interconnections of thought, memory, desire, and intention. All of these things can get lost in the noise of modernity and the things that we—that I—in order to escape daily routine. Yet it is in that daily routine that I learn to appreciate variation and to appreciate silence. It is in that routine and the deep disconnect that I finally look at myself and see, and perhaps more importantly, hear what my mind and my heart are trying to say.

These journeys never last long enough, but they usually last long enough to hear the whispers of myself and to see if only for a moment what matters in my life and what is missing in my life and where things are out of balance. I won’t pretend I’ve landed upon that understanding in the handful of hours I’ve spent in the back woods of Tennessee far enough that I can’t hear the highway but close enough to the world that the rumble of trucks navigating the back roads and still stretching the reach of civilization finds my ears pricking up to the sound.

I am happy.

I am mindful of the writers who came before me to places such as this and dumped their troubles unto the page with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and the twinkle of promise in their eyes. I am mindful of the world I left with the fabricated drama of youth football teams, the stress of too many hours of work, the promised challenge of ‘literary competitiveness’, and all that comes with being a man in the world. To that world I say, “See you soon. I’ll be ready for you now.”