Vacationing
Ok, have a seat. This is going to take a little longer than my heavily-edited moderately-stilted prose attempts at wit, wisdom, and condensed life experience. That stuff falls flat more often than not, anyway.
Some things have happened over the past few days that knit themselves into a little ball that I feel the need to tug the strings of. You know that part in a TV show where you know it’s the season finale because you can just feel the writers pulling hard at these strings they’ve strung between characters? I always imagine a sweater, and you have a hold of a few of the pieces and you keep pulling and the fabric is bunching and warping in places. You really see how it is all connected. Ok, this is possibly not edited enough. Starting again…
This past Wednesday through Saturday I went with Mykala and my parents and sister up to a beautiful cottage on Lake Superior. The moment we walked in and I realized I could see straight from the front door, through the back of the house, to the shore I knew it was going to be great. Though we had some very nice outings, this wasn’t a Disneyland packed-with-activities vacation. You know what we took time to do? Sleep. Make coffee the slow way. Read. Stretch. Look through the telescope out into the bay. Talk. Play a form of charades called Guesstures.
Mykala says during a true vacation, you “vacate your life”, and that is part of the magic of it. Stripped of routine and obligation, you climb out of the accretions built up around you and become more of yourself. This trip I was able to actually relax and stop worrying long enough for this to happen. And though I have frequently said it, I finally felt the truth of this: there is not and should not be a destination. Now, I was not laboring under the illusion that financial independence or any other goal like home ownership or a piece of real estate further from the interstate was going to automatically confer a zenlike state of happiness, but I think my instinct still said that that was the case. But there can not be a once I get there any longer. I spent 25 years with that structure: once I get to summer vacation, once I get to high school, once I get to college, once I get through this semester, once I graduate, once I get into dental school, once I get OUT of dental school, once I get X level of experience doing dentistry.
I wish there was a better way to say “the journey is the destination” but I think that phrase can be taken a right way and a wrong way. The wrong way: oh right, enjoy the journey, yep. Now excuse me while I agonize every Sunday night about the week ahead, lose sleep over things I can’t control, become preoccupied with those I can, and quite thoroughly and completely fail to enjoy whatever is happening at the moment. The right way: recognize the tremendous difficulty of enjoying anything during the moment it is happening. Structure your life to maximize these moments. Struggle. Reassess. Keep trying. Let’s see, if I minimize my debt, work becomes less stressful. If I expect less from my job, I won’t find a hole where I seek fulfillment.
These pure moments of insight are so damn fleeting that is enough to drive you crazy! There’s a delicate little bubble and inside is the truth and value in stepping off the treadmill of More. Then that bubble immediately collapses under the pressure of the exigencies of one’s return to normal life. I do not know how to do it, but the fact I’m getting closer to keeping that bubble seems promising.
Simple to understand, maddening to apply: “There is no goal. There is you and now, and those you have.”
Having covered the “no goal”, I turn to the “those you have.” Notice I never said “once I get a lovely, wonderful girlfriend.” That’s because that’s a goal involving people, which seem to be more rather than less valid the more you pursue them. I can look you in the eye and say with total certainty that my life would be worse had I not met such a wonderful woman, and had we not thrown our lots in together.
And that brings us even closer to the lynchpin: you can pursue wordly goals at the expense of others (they are always at the expense of others), and the magic is, you can hold them so tight they’ll never leave you. You can insure that bank account or that building or that business, you can invest and save with such tenacity that the numbers in your accounts always rise. You can surround yourself with all of it, and it. will. be. there. until you die. But your efforts with those around you can disappear in an instant. You become vulnerable when you say: “Wife/sister/mother/father/brother/friend, I will give of myself to you, I will commit to your wellbeing. Be happy when you are sad, elated when you’ve found joy. And I know I will lose you.”
My cousin Beth died recently. Having cut ties with our families years ago, she passed before any last words of resolution could be exchanged. Mykala’s grandma has cancer. My dad has a type of cancer. Nils’ dad Garry has cancer, a tenacious and cruel variety that is stealing him away from his family day by day, without the mercy of a clean break. Driving home today, I just found out that John’s wife Kellie, her brother Keith just passed away. She learned sign language for him, and they talked that way. I was at John and Kellie’s wedding, and Keith’s speech was wonderful.
There is no way to vacate the part of us that has lost. We can leave behind the bank accounts and businesses, but those we know and those we lose are part of us. I may not be able to introduce folks to Garry Espe or Keith Rosenberg or Beth McAulay, but I can tell you what they were like. And all of us who are left wrap our tattered threads around one another, and we fill in those spots of the tapestry. There is no insurance, no assurance, no certainty, and I wish that wasn’t what made these people all the more important, but it is. It has to be. And it makes me sad and happy to have known who I have, and sad to lose, and happy to love, and sad when I turn away.
And I guess that’s what I learned on vacation.