Slowing down
After decades of being focused and busy, the transition to aimlessness is challenging
YACHATS—The waves build, roll and crash. I watch one after the other, but with each fold of white feel a certain anxiousness, as if I’m undeserving of such pleasure. As if I should be doing something more significant. As if I should feel guilty for having already stayed too long at the fair.
This is what happens when you spend the bulk of your life drugged out on deadlines and now find yourself in detox, trying to do something you’ve been trying to do for more than a decade.
Relax.
To quit smoking, a friend of mine sequestered himself in a friend’s cabin near Leavenworth, Washington, last Memorial Day weekend. It worked. He got through the endeavor, returned to Oregon and hasn’t had a puff since.
This is my own private Washington. Here I am, alone in our family cabin, trying to force myself to go cold turkey and give up my addiction to always doing something. To reconsider that, in my personal definition of time management, perhaps “watching waves” needs to be re-classified as “doing something.” To teach myself how to walk again with no destination in mind.
Is that even legal? I mean, even though I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, I did so with well-defined mileage goals for 148 days over 11 years. Now, I’m trying to learn the fine art of aimlessness.
It isn’t easy.
Thus far, my major success has been napping without guilt. But other variations of relaxation are more challenging Consider puttering, “to do things in a relaxed way without rushing or trying very hard.” This is clearly an upper-level course for me. You can’t just go from multi-tasking to organizing your nails by size overnight.
And don’t get me going about reading a book without using sticky notes—like, for pure pleasure. I use the markers so I can mine info for future columns or books or who-knows-what; it just seems wrong to let a splash of wisdom wash across the bow of the boat and back into the lake without having been noted.
OK, BEFORE SUCH existential meanderings devolve further, let me just say it: I’m complicated. So let me offer some contextual history, most of which I do so with more reluctance than pride: