Remember

“I guess this is me now.” I said this out loud to myself a couple months ago as I left REI, carrying an armful (they were having a sale, okay?) of purchases for my impending trip and feeling a bit stunned. When I told a friend about this, she laughed and said she’d just seen the perfect ball cap for me. It read: “Kinda Outdoorsy.” Sounds right.

I’m getting excited about my trip to British Columbia and it’s finally starting to feel real. I booked the trip and bought the stuff, now I just have to pack it up and get on the plane. Then I’ll be 3000 miles way, riding an unfamiliar horse in the wild mountains and sleeping in a tent.

And when I come home, I’ll be the kind of person who does that kind of thing. Transformed. Not in a my-life-is-totally-different-now way. But I will have spent four days immersed in nature. Four days reprogramming my frazzled nervous system, nurturing the essence of my being. My experience of this world will be expanded. Then inevitably, my consciousness will contract to its present state. I’ve heard it said that in Arabic, the word “human” shares its root with the word for “to forget.”

I get so caught up in my daily life that I forget the multitude of possibilities. Just the other day, I was working from home and at lunchtime I took my dog out into our yard. It was warm and sunny, with a few fluffy white clouds and a steady but gentle cooling breeze. Why haven’t I been sitting outside? I wondered. Because I forget that I can.

The rapid, rhythmic blur of life in the Northeast combined with the narcotic of our consumer culture can stupefy my restless spirit. I lose the certainty that there is more to life than the drone of work and worry, interspersed with brief bursts of joy and connection. Routine puts my wonder to sleep. Travel wakes it up.

Travel reminds me there is greater variety in this world than in the tiny sliver I experience in my daily life. Like the topography and weather of Hawaii, with its dramatic proximity of mountains to ocean and daily dose of light rain. Or the culture in Amsterdam, where there will be handwritten notes taped to shop doors reading, “I’ll be in at 11 today” or “We'll be back at 2.” At restaurants there, I thought the service was terrible because it was frustratingly hard to get a check when I was ready to leave. Then, I realized that unlike in the US, no one was in a rush. When people go to a cafe or restaurant there, they sit and talk for hours.

I try to remind myself each day that I have final authority and full responsibility for my life. Art helps. Today, I read from Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Red Bird these lines in the poem “Mornings at Blackwater”:

“…the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.” 

Today, I choose to be in love with my life and to take small actions that remind me I can do things differently. Today, I refuse to drown in the torrent of pressures and anxieties released by an industrial capitalist system that attempts to enslave us in a cycle of toil and escape, while a few billionaires profit off both the factories where we labor and the amusement parks where we spend our hard-earned treasure and our precious time.

Today I returned some things I don’t really need to REI and Amazon. Then I took my dog out to the dirt path that runs through our town, and there we walked beneath the towering oaks and pines, listening to the roar of the creek below.