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Leaving the fast lane is harder than it looks
The simple pleasures can be elusive in a world where more is always better. Sometimes a week or two of vacation can help you see the light.
By Harry Domash
Like many Americans, my family likes to see something unique on our summer vacation. We try to imagine what it would be like to live a different kind of life, one in a cabin in Yosemite National Park, in the Anasazi cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde or amid the desert landscape at Monument Valley.
This summer we drove 3,000 miles through the East and Midwest, stopping in places like Buffalo, N.Y., Green Bay, Wis., and Moose Lake, Minn., and what I saw is that Ive lost my perspective again.
The tourists I saw drinking beer in the Wisconsin Dells, eating hot dogs at the Cleveland Indians game, buying underwear at the Mall of America and line dancing on the S.S. Badger, a ferry that crosses Lake Michigan, were on a different rhythm from me. It reminded me that its time to downshift again.
Not that these folks have an easier life. Quite the opposite. People everywhere are worried about the economy. And theyre worried about becoming irrelevant. When I asked my brother, who has always been able to fix anything, if he would take a look at some gizmo my son had hooked up in the car to see why it wasnt working, he said you cant fix anything on cars anymore without a masters degree, because theyve all been computerized.
It reminded me of when my dad told me that it wasnt possible for a regular guy to make a living anymore. A couple months later he died, in his 50s.
Feeding the hungry furnace
So the people I saw were not living off the fat of the land. Still, they were not striving in the same compulsive way that I see in myself and many of my friends here on the East Coast. I grew up in rural northern Minnesota but spent the 80s and most of the 90s in Manhattan, where I just kept moving faster and faster and faster. We owned two apartments and had two kids in private schools, and I got up at 3 a.m. and started writing and just wrote all day long. Sometimes I couldnt sleep, and so Id get up and write some more. I felt like I was fueling a hungry furnace that would burn only U.S. currency, and it was up to me to keep the fire alive.
In the summer of 1995, the parents of one of my daughters classmates at the United Nations School invited us to housesit at their place in Greenport, N.Y., on the tip of the north shore of Long Island, while they visited family in Italy and Greece.
Everyone in my family except me wanted to do it. I couldnt imagine eight weeks of nothingness, just going to bed and getting up in the morning and being there. I agreed to give it a try, provided I would be allowed to back out if I went crazy.
In the house, I found a book called Plain and Simple, by an artist named Sue Bender, who spent five summers living with the Amish. Bender said that the Amish did not distinguish between their daily tasks by categorizing some of them as unimportant and others as important. Everything was sacred. And everything was ordinary. They spent the same time and took the same care in shelling peas as in making dolls or quilts.
It reminded me of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland celebrating the unbirthday. It was the opposite of what I did, rushing through folding laundry and buying groceries, looking at my watch every three minutes until I could get back to my computer and crank out more words, for which I would be paid as much as $5 apiece. How could I justify spending 30 minutes ironing a tablecloth when I might be able to sell 500 words instead?
Magical getaway
That summer in Greenport was ordinary. And it was magical. My husband and I wrote in the early mornings, sometimes out on the back porch. Then we took the kids to the carnival or to the dump, where they had a special section of resale items, to a drive-in with carhops on roller skates, and on the ferryboat to Shelter Island. We walked home in the dark after dinner and watched the moon and the stars and counted lightning bugs and rabbits. And we decided to move to the country.
Ive felt a bit smug in the five years since we moved, believing that Id actually begun to live a bit like the Amish, turning away much of the journalism work that came in so I could spend time on the things that I wanted to do: study fiction writing and work on a novel, bike, hike and tutor in English as a second language.
But our trip to the Midwest showed me how little Id actually changed. I looked back over my journals and noticed how the sense of timelessness gave way to lists and charts and graphs. I took up gardening and discovered I hated it and was terrible at it. My husband and I talked about adding a conservatory to the house and how much that might cost. I got involved in all the things Id promised myself to avoid when we moved.
Our trip to the Midwest showed me that I still seem to see everything in terms of goals and achievements. I do not take the same loving care in sweeping out the garage or washing lettuce leaves as I do in writing a book. I havent been successful in leaving my striving self behind. Every morning I tell myself: Just zip off your ego and leave it on the porch. But it escapes and finds me, usually before lunch. My life is crowded again. I expected to have more time for spirituality in the country, but I see that even that has taken the form of a list: Take a course on Paul. Go to a Zen retreat. Study Islam. I joined the Institute of Advanced Theology at a local college.
Edward Weston lights the path
Is it true for all of us that when our time is empty, we feel compelled to fill it with meaning, with model trains or a trip to Atlantic City, a dinner party or a life drawing class, that we cant accept that emptiness can have its own meaning?
I wouldnt want to trade places with the people I saw in the Midwest. No. I like my life. But I remember when we first moved and I could be spontaneous. If it snowed overnight, I took out my cross-country skis and headed into the woods with the dogs. I didnt have a 12-item list of things that needed to be done that day.
The great photographer Edward Weston said that he simplified his life so that he didnt need to make much money and he could use most of the hours of light making photographs. I suspect the reason so few of us do that is that we dont know what it is we want to spend the hours of light doing.
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