I want to leave. Want to hop in the car and go somewhere else. It’s time. I can feel it in my bones. The beach is calling, and I must go. Except, maybe not. Something holds me in place, something gentle but persistent, something like birdsong, beckoning me to participate in here. To enjoy the place I am instead of pining for another.
This week is a break. My children are in California with their mother, and I am here with my wife and her children who remain in school, studying in the bonus room we converted into a classroom at the beginning of the year.
Spring has not yet sprung, but it is starting to blossom—slowly. I tend to think of this season as a battle between death and what wants to come next. In Tennessee, March is an advance on the forces of winter, a near militant move towards a brighter, greener way of being.
But it does not come without a fight.
This morning, there was frost on my neighbor’s windshield, and I noticed the very tops on the grass leaves glistening with an icy glint. Later, it will be warm enough to go for a walk in a T-shirt and shorts; but whilst wrapped in blankets, sitting on my porch, I could see fog coming out my mouth. It’s like this for a while, a tension between two different kinds of weather, a marriage of opposites.
As I finished my morning coffee, breathing in and out huge billows of steam, I watched my other neighbor step out his front door for the first cigarette of the day. He will later be joined by his wife when he takes his second break in a couple of hours. She will talk, and he will listen, rarely responding except to nod and grunt, continuing to take intermittent hits of nicotine. I suppose everyone has their own ways of coping with everything.
Before I got out of bed, before I boiled the water or ground the coffee, before I did amateur yoga stretches and attempted to meditate, I pulled out my laptop and considered disappearing this week. Pulled up a list of beach hotels within driving distance, I thought about it, had enough points to make it work, and wondered if this was what we needed. To get away. To take a Spring Break Trip.
But what, then?
Sometimes when our kids demand we go somewhere and do something, my wife and I reply, “We are doing something.” This sitting around and reading books, this lounging around on a Saturday, listening to music while we fry up pancakes in the kitchen, is something. And we are doing it. We could also add: here is somewhere, too. We don’t have to go anywhere, because we already did. That’s how we got here.
Earlier this year, during the first few days of January, Chantel and I went out for coffee, spending the greater part of a day writing down a list of principles we wanted to guide our family. One of them was, “Rest is an activity.”
The idea that we always have to be doing something, that we should always be busy, is not a thing we believe. I understand this is part and parcel with the Protestant work ethic that runs rampant through our culture, but I am not so sure it is healthy. Alan Watts once remarked on the hyper-activity of modern society, saying it’s hard to tell the difference between industriousness and anxiety. Sometimes, there is no difference.
Of course, knowing this does not make one immune to the knee-jerk tendency to stay active at all costs. I often load my schedule with too many meetings, too many calls, and too much to do. On any given week, I can be seen trying to pack it all in, pushing myself to keep up, complaining about how busy I am. Inevitably, I get sick and have to take a day off or use the weekend to rest (which my wife tells me is what weekends are for, but I’m not convinced). Once recovered, I am right back at it, ready to tackle the next thing. Which may be why I sometimes feel the need to get away from all this hustle and bustle.
For most of my life, home has been something of a stopover—a place to be left, not somewhere to return. Call it the result of moving around every year for the first decade of life, but I was always ready to go somewhere. Maybe it’s the “trauma” or ADD or a general condition of being human. I don’t know. What I notice in myself is that every few months, there is a pull to depart. To flee to some place foreign and unusual and experience something new. I can’t say this is always bad, as I have many an adventure to credit for such an urge. But it comes with a cost.
Once, a couple winters back, we spent Christmas Break down on the Florida Panhandle, thinking it would be a nice way to celebrate the holidays. The first night of that weeklong stay, however, I found myself so filled with energy that I had to get out of bed just before midnight to go for a two-hour walk.
The beaches were closed, but I found a public gate that had been left open and walked for a while beside the crashing waves. Then, I worked my way off the beach, hopping a fence and ending up in a private resort area that had me locked in. I had to hop another fence, run down the beach, paranoid someone might “catch me,” then got lost a couple more times and arrived back at the rental around two. The rest of the trip was relatively peaceful, but there was always an itchy feeling that we should be doing more. Even a trip to the beach can be not enough.
I see this same tendency reflected around me: the need to pack it in, to keep adding more. I see it in homes too big for the people they house, filled with stuff they cannot possibly manage. I see garages stuffed full of gadgets that could easily benefit an entire community. Does one neighborhood actually need a dozen leaf blowers, a dozen weed eaters, a dozen sets of hedge trimmers? The other day, I counted no fewer than nine vehicles parked in front of two homes, filling the driveways and spilling out into the street. There aren’t even nine adults who live in those houses. But this is middle America, and “more” is our motto.
From what I can tell, many of my neighbors can’t sit still for long. I know this, because I watch them return from work, pack up the minivan and fifteen minutes later head out again. I see them coming and going from church, to Home Depot, to extracurricular activities. There is always somewhere else to go.
Sometimes, I join the frenzy; I can’t help it. When everyone around you is mowing, blowing, and trimming, it creates a sort of vortex of busyness. You get sucked in. And in a culture where motion means progress, staying still can feel a lot like death. So we have to keep going, have to keep striving and straining, never resting for long—constantly surveying the horizon for what’s next while fidgeting with what’s in front of us, inspecting the moment for its insufficiencies.
Even in silence, there is much to hear.
Yesterday, my wife and I went for a hike. The wind blew hard, and we had to move at a certain pace just to stay warm. As we passed other couples, we noticed many people looking at their smartphones, listening to something on their headphones, shouting to their companions at a volume that did not seem appropriate. Then again, I have become—as my wife later put it, watching me cringe at dubstep music playing in a coffee shop—“a man of silence.” We just can’t seem to keep quiet or remain still for long. But that, I think, is only because we misunderstand these states. Even in silence, there is much to hear.
It’s true what the mystics say, that out of stillness something speaks. That something comes from within, bubbling up as a spring; and there is beauty to be heard here, of course. But there is also everything else, and that “everything” can be overwhelming. The agitation and anxiety. The fear and insecurity. If you sit still long enough, all your unsettledness may come brimming to the surface, and that’s enough to keep anyone moving from one place to the next.
Whenever I think of travel, something I have done for a good part of my life, I am often reminded of that conversation in The Sun Also Rises where Jake says to a restless Robert Cohn who’s considering running away to South America, “You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” He’s right, it’s true. I’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work.
I thought of all this early in the morning as I considered a last-minute trip to somewhere, anywhere. But then I thought of the budget and the groceries we had just bought that are supposed to last us the week. I thought of work and the big pockets of time on my schedule set aside to get it done. I thought of our warm and soft bed and how even the most accommodating of hotels doesn’t match what we’ve created in our little getaway upstairs.
And then, I looked out the window of my office and saw the bright sun breaking into our house through all the places it can, recalling why we chose this home to start a new family, how we loved its brightness and the promise it held for two people attempting the impossible. I looked at our piles of books and remembered our record player which can shake the whole home with the warmth of music.
I saw the place we fought so hard to get to, a place that may not need an escape.
Yes, I know it’s customary, at least for a certain class of people, to take advantage of a weeklong break and go somewhere else. We’ve done it before and will do it again. But this week, we are going to stay put and spend a couple hours in the kitchen each night making dinner, cooking our way through the pantry, using up all our dried goods. I am going to try to remain in one place a little longer than is comfortable. I am rarely ever right where I am, so it seems a shame to not give it a try.
After all, here is somewhere, too.
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One of the things I've enjoyed about getting older is not being so available to other people. I've always been averse to small talk, but these days I have prioritized my own silence. Some might say I'm not being sociable, but I find I'm better company when I've had the time to think the thoughts that only silence welcomes.
So true in so many ways. I can easily get caught in a daily list and when I put it aside, caught in things that mostly seem meaningless. It takes effort, like pushing against a current to tell myself I can actually read…a real book not on my phone…for a few minutes…during the day. And it helps to have routines that are soul-nourishing. Like your cup of morning coffee with your lovely wife. Or my sunrise and sunset walks on the beach. Nourishing things. I hope your week is lovely.