This morning I woke up for the first time in, oh, three weeks with a slight, but familiar, sense of dread. It took me a minute to figure out that the dread was about: In four days we have to pack all this stuff into our suitcases. It is the dread of unfinished business, something that I almost always have, and that I’ve been able to do without since we made it into the first rental apartment.
The unfinished business of packing in a few days is a relatively small business; we can probably do it in a couple of hours of focused work. But it is also a sort of a cork in a bottle, behind which (imagine a cartoon bottle, vibrating gently) is all the other unfinished business. Some is unpleasant, some is neutral, much is actually pleasant and satisfying business, but it’s all stuff that has to be done. And it’s not that I want to live without the stuff for the rest of my life, but it has been lovely to live without most of the has-to-be-done of it all for a couple of weeks.
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On each of our trips I have learned a little something to take back, something to make my life marginally better even if in only a little way.
Our first trip was really the first time I went climbing on rock, and while it didn’t turn into a huge lifestyle change for me, it is something I enjoy doing once in a while, and I’m glad I know something now, in a tactile way, about this thing that Mark and my older kids really love to do.
I also learned that the small luxury of drinking fizzy water instead of plain tap water was something I wanted to have all the time. A funny, small thing to take home, and one that you know, costs a little money, but it’s a lot of pleasure for not that much. Also I am pretty sure I drink more water this way, so maybe it is good for me.
That’s just to give you a couple of examples.
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I would like to take home with me this time some sense of the lifting of the weight of the have-to-do-it. I do not know how I can do this, given that, uh, I still have to do the things.
I am used to that sense of weight bearing down on me, a little red timer ticking away invisibly just out of my peripheral vision, or a host of those timers, never letting me quite relax and rest. Not only am I used to it, the urgency, the open loops turning in my head: I am dependent on it. I believe, deep down, that if I wasn’t thinking about all the things I have to do all the time, I wouldn’t do them. At least not in time to prevent something awful.
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Something about being here for long enough, possibly the distance, possibly the impotence that distance brings, has lifted the weight. There’s still a lot of stuff that I have to do when I get back. But I am somewhere else and I cannot do it now, and somehow I have mentally shelved it all, or at least stuffed it in the bottle behind packing on Thursday. And yet I’m not worried I’ll lose the threads when I need to pick them up.
I wonder if there’s an attitude shift I can possibly make that will keep me on a journey even after I’m home. Hmm?
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