We just finished a family vacation in the North Woods of Minnesota at YMCA Camp du Nord. Every time we go it is a bit different; some years we have struck up many conversations with the other campers; some years we have spent a great deal of time closely together as a family. This year Mark’s parents joined us, which was lovely, and so we got a larger cabin —
— well, it was more that we snagged a larger cabin, so they were able to join us. Cabin assignment is by a lottery system, and we were lucky this year — at first, we didn’t get anything at all, but went on the waiting list, and they called us later to offer us a cabin that slept ten in the last week of the summer. We took it.
Anyway, this year it felt like a quiet retreat.
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| I’ve owned these Teva sandals for more than twenty years. |
I determined to take no work with me, and requested recommendation for novels. My chief activity was sitting in a camp chair on the beach, where the creek trickles down to the clear cold lake and endlessly lays down its light sandy burden, reading in the sun. Late summer in northern Minnesota: the sun would go behind a cloud and I would put on my hat and cover my shivering knees with my fleece, then the sun would come out and I would take off my hat and fleece, slide my toes into the suddenly hot sand.
Nominally I was supervising the 2yo and the 6yo, but they didn’t take much supervising. The 6yo and a band of his fellows and a lot of plastic shovels were busily damming up the creek with a series of sandy terraces and logs dragged from the edge of the forest. I imagine the creek is dammed over and over, week after week, all summer long. The 2yo commandeered somebody else’s plastic dump truck and drove it endlessly in and out of the very edge of the lake. The first full sunny day he would not touch the water, the second day he splashed at it, and by the fourth and last sunny day he was brave enough to venture knee-deep.
I am not really a beach person, but I drank in the sun this last week of the summer. Lately, living as I do in Minnesota, and growing older, I feel more and more acutely the swiftness of the warm sunny days and the slow march of the coming chill. Summer no longer stretches out before me indefinitely. I know the snow and ice is coming back too soon. It isn’t that I don’t like winter up here — I do; it’s just that it overstays its welcome, and I never quite feel that I have had enough of the warmth in each year. As a child in southern Ohio, where winters are not as interesting or beautiful but where they last the correct amount of time, I used to comfort myself in January, at the bus stop, by imagining how pleasant it would feel to swelter under hot sun, and I also used to long in July for a single gust of frigid wind and a few pricks of refreshingly icy sleet. Now I still sometimes fantasize about the former. But not the latter, no matter how sweaty we get. Why bother fantasizing about the wind and cold? It’s going to be here soon enough, you can count on it.
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It occurs to me just now that I speak from a certain place of privilege, namely (a) my house is air-conditioned and (b) mosquitoes really don’t seem to like me very much. So there is that.
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Besides reading and being the designated person to “watch” my youngest boys on the beach — I must have put at least twelve to fifteen hours in on the beach in a course of a week — I had a few hours to spend with Mark. We went on two trail runs together and also a two-hour kayak paddle. I found that the trail runs seemed to make my troublesome hip feel better rather than worse. Need to find a new way to move around that is less monotonous, perhaps, than padding around and around the flat paved lakeside paths.
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I brought no work with me, but only leisure, which is to say that I brought a few books of botany and plant idenfication, several novels to read of the challenging and literary kind, and also a novel in French — I saved weight by downloading an offline dictionary app. My mother-in-law had brought a basket of crocheting along with her, and I contemplated that as I considered the knitting class that was offered as a camp activity.
What is your personality type? We are always asking this question, it’s a new kind of horoscope we tell. Sometimes it’s silly and fun (what Jane Austen character are you?), other times pseudoscientific (introvert or extrovert? INTJ or ESFP?), veers from time to time into quackery (Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type anyone?) and occasionally it hits on something that — not everyone — but some people find genuinely useful, even life-changing (I hear that pretty often about 5 Love Languages).
I have this one completely nonstop friend, whose six children cover a range as wide as mine but a little bit older. Her previous life was technical corporate training, so we have a kind of affinity there, each of us having turned a ridiculously analytic personality towards managing and educating a house full of children. She is constantly doing something, running something, creating something. I often suspect her of dealing with stress, or solving logistical problems, by becoming more busy. It is the kind of thing that in movies portends everything coming crashing down because no one can just keep going like that, right? But it seems to work for her — I suppose there may be a deep internal disaster that none of us can see, isn’t that always a possibility, but I can’t see one. I am fully ready to believe that what would exhaust me is what inspires, fuels, even soothes her.
We were talking the other day about cooking, and she commented how restful it is for her to be creating and producing things — how making something complicated and multistep, baking Bavarian pretzels I think we were talking about, puts her in touch with family members from long ago, soothes and comforts even in the busy-ness, when there is a tangible thing taking shape under her capable hands.
I am not like that, and that looks like work to me instead of rest. But what is rest to me is work to someone else. And superficially useless work at that!
What refreshes and re-creates me is learning. I told Mark as we picked our way rapidly among winding tree-roots on the trail, “One time when we were here — I believe it was in 2009 — I brought that one botany coursebook up with me, and I spent the whole week learning to identify different families of plants by sight. It’s so weird to think so, because there is no foreseeable use for this knowledge for me. But it felt so satisfying just to learn their names and to recognize them. I don’t understand what is so satisfying about nothing more than putting a label on a thing, but it is deeply satisfying to me. I don’t even expect or desire to use the knowledge to impress anyone, and the kids aren’t very interested in it either. It’s like the same thing that makes some people collect coins, or butterflies — you catch one and you put a pin through it and a label on it and you keep it in a case. Except it’s only in my head, I don’t even have a gallery to show anyone. But there is something just as satisfying, as if merely by learning to recognize the butterfly and knowing its name, I have collected it. I don’t need the physical butterfly, but somehow I have caught it and I possess it if I know it by sight and by name.”
And it is restful to me: study for the sake of study, knowledge for the
sake of knowledge. I try things for a while and enjoy the trying and sometimes never pick them up again because I don’t have to, there are so many other things to try. I read French for fun and write down the vocabulary just as I did in school; but I don’t teach my children French because to do so would be to miss an opportunity to learn a new language with them, so we learn Latin and dabble here and there in other languages, Italian, Polish, as opportunity moves us. I buy textbooks and struggle through them. I play with apps designed to teach children how to program computers; even though I once wrote code, I am rusty, and never was all that good at it anyway, and the latest app promises to award points for shorter code with fewer steps, and has constraints that make it interesting. I find that fiction, really good fiction, is too difficult for me unless I have uninterrupted time, which is why I took good novels with me on vacation, but I am constantly reading nonfiction as my light mindless reading to settle the brain before bed: a lot of history, but also sciences and disciplines of engineering, especially the ones that are more of a mystery to me because I didn’t have them much in school.
We say that introverts and extroverts (by one common and fairly useful definition) are distinguished by whether they seek solitude or company in order to recharge the batteries, so to speak. I wonder if we can also usefully classify ourselves by what sort of work we find restful. Not just what we find agreeable; There is work that I enjoy and have an aptitude for but that is still work to me — I am thinking of the school-planning here. I do it because it saves me a kind of work I like less (winging it in front of the children), but I wouldn’t do it for fun. But I learn for no good reason at all except that it makes me deeply contented and happy.
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Just one short note here without explanation: I erred gravely in thinking that this feature of my personality would make me an excellent academic.
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“Usefully classify ourselves.” That sounds like the lepidopterist-of-ideas in me again. No, I think it is useful — in the way that some find the five love languages useful — it can help us understand each other and give each other the space and resources that we need to recharge, so important in families; and help us to understand why apparent frivolities can be so desperately important — how close we come to striking someone else to the heart, sometimes, when we lightly tease them about wasting their time!
And also to give us permission to be ourselves and to love what we love. Extroverts and morning persons dominate, and maintain their hegemony by ridiculing night owls for laziness and introverts for backwardness, but why should there be only one schedule of wakefulness, one pattern of sociability? Is it taking it to an extreme, this claiming of being marginalized even in these areas of comparative unimportance, a sign that our culture is unhealthily obsessed with victimhood? Maybe, or maybe it’s just noticing the large pattern writ small, that humans tend to crush and shame differences of all types everywhere we are.
Anyway. What is work for some is refreshment to others; “leisure” is relative. What leisure of yours is work to someone else?
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