For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been a precarious mountain drive from any grocery store, restaurant, or any other place of business or recreation. Not that the accessibility of such places is relevant to most of us now. Packages come once a week, bears will drink your hummingbird feeder like a glass of iced tea, and the closest neighbor, a cranky gentleman named Bob, feels very strongly about personal land ownership and making sure that you do, too.
It’s also a dark sky community, which means that once the last light goes off over at Bob’s house, there’s nothing but the moon and stars. No sickly, purple glow from the recently built Valero two miles down the road. No blast of party-pop country music from over the fence. I’ve become attuned to the social lives of the birds. (Rufus is such a bully.) The windows are perpetually open, and the breeze comes to you free of the sounds of the road. I’ve been reading with a focus I haven’t experienced since I was a teenager.
When I’m at home, I never really enjoy downtime. Watching several episodes of The Great British Baking Show is like a sedative taken through the eyes and ears. It’s not enough to completely drown out the worrying buzz of unfinished tasks, and after, it’s the hangover of regret and wasted time. You know you can’t party like that anymore at your age! What were you thinking? Just look at that pile of unopened mail.
Here, my mail is a couple of western-sized states away, so I might as well enjoy myself, right? And I have been. I’ve been sleeping well, not focusing on all the things I haven’t done. There must be a difference in quality when it comes to escapism, because that’s exactly what this is. The trick must be to choose activities that make you feel stronger afterward. Not all kinds of escapism are bio-available. Like those potato chips made from the crazy, lab-created oil with no nutritional value that uh…went right through a person.
I suspect that all of my beautiful planning falls into this latter category. Because I love to plan. My house, car, and pockets are full of lists. I enjoy thinking about what I want to do so much that I don’t know when to stop. I build the vision until it becomes a mountain and the first step a pointless effort, thus adding to the pile of guilt-inducing, neglected obligations. These unrealized plans are no more fulfilling than an hour eating jelly beans and pinning sewing patterns on Pinterest that I’ll never get around to using…which is a completely hypothetical, made up scenario with which I have no experience.
This is the rare gift of being plucked from your life and seeing it from a distance. For days and days, even. This will likely never again happen in my lifetime. I can feel myself wading into some nasty Eat Pray Love territory here. “Oh my gosh, Lindsey. What you really need to do is to go stay in a private residence in a secluded, fairy-tale, mountain valley for a couple of weeks. Take the initiative to find yourself, girl!”
Getting to step back like this is a privilege, especially now when we’re all contending with varying degrees of anxiety and hardship unlike we’ve ever seen. I want to use this opportunity to sift through years’ worth of detritus stuffed into the corners of my mind and separate what I will keep and follow through with from the things I’ll let go. (Is that a fiddle over there behind that Russian textbook? Good Lord.) Homemade clothing and vegan recipes cannot change a life, but making decisions and following through can. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?
