Vacation Calm: Finding it Close to Home

 

I just got back from vacation. On our trip we snorkeled, kayaked, and hiked in the beautiful Galapagos Islands. The natural beauty we witnessed was beyond anything I’ve experienced in my life. There were swimming pool clear beaches and lava rock hikes, lush greenery in the highlands where the land tortoises live. There were Blue-Footed Boobies, Frigate birds, iguanas and sea lions. And so much more. At dinner the night before we were to get off the boat we’d spent the week exploring on, I cried. 

I cried because we were leaving a place of protected, majestic beauty. I cried because I might never play in the water with sea lions again. I cried because we we returning to cell service. I cried because the chatter and logistics of my job were closer once we reached land. I cried because I felt so calm and I knew that I’d lose this when I got home. 

The day after I got home from vacation I went back to work. “I need a new job,” I thought to myself as I scrolled through two weeks of emails, jotting down to-dos on my spiral notebook. Nothing seemed important; nothing felt meaningful or moving. 

I struggled to focus on my work. I fought off images of swimming with sea lions and sea turtles. I tried to block out the memory of the school of dolphins we’d come across or the baby albatrosses we’d seen nesting. As I stared at my computer I longed for the quiet that came when I was snorkeling, my body gently buoyed by my wetsuit, my breath, loud and rhythmic through my snorkel, schools of fish darting towards and away from me. 

On our trip my niece asked me if it was normal to hear her breath so loudly with the snorkel. It freaked her out and she thought she might be doing something wrong. “No,” I explained, “that’s what you want to hear. That’s normal.” I love the sound of my breath when snorkeling. Amplified like Darth Vader in the darkness under the water when snorkeling, I exist in a suspended chamber of silence. 

This is what I miss as I force myself back to work; back to reality. Is that kind of quiet only possible 3000 miles away on a remote cluster of islands? Is it possible to have vacation calm in real life? 

This morning, still a little jet lagged, I woke up at 5 am and went for a walk in the pitch black cold morning. I brought a headlamp to guide me on the path along the lake. In the dark I could hear the ducks in the lake, an occasional float of coots swooping up and landing a few feet from the shore. It was so quiet I could hear my breath as I walked. 

In the quiet darkness I felt calm. I walked for a long time. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I turned off my headlamp. The air was cold against my cheeks and my eyes watered from the wind. 

I thought about snorkeling, how without the protection of my wetsuit my hands and my ears got cold in the frigid ocean water. I was reminded of the calm I felt floating in the darkness below the surface. As I walked I could almost bring myself back there. The feeling was the same — quiet darkness. It is possible. Vacation calm, just a few miles from my house.

I'm an Excellent Packer

I’m getting ready for a big trip. We leave in less than two days and I’ve been thinking about packing for months. I have made piles and lists. I have a notes app on my phone that I’ve opened and edited at least fifty times. I’ve run through every possible devastating scenario in my mind. I’ve printed out airport maps and checked that my Lyft app is fully loaded onto my phone. I’ve gathered and packed medications for every possible ailment. I’ve contemplated snacks and washed my favorite scarf to keep me warm on the plane. In the process of it all I’ve lost my glasses, adding one more thing to worry about in the thirty-six hours before I leave. 

We’re going on a lifetime adventure to the Galapagos Islands and, while I’m excited for the trip, I recognize that I’ve spent so much psychic energy preparing that I’m kind of exhausted even before zipping my suitcase. The joke in my family is that I love packing. For my birthday this year I got packing cubes, little soft suitcases that I can put in my big suitcase to keep me even more organized. The truth is, I’m not really organized at all. I’m just incredibly anxious. Every act of packing makes me feel a tiny bit more in control of an experience I have very little control of.

As I sit here writing this I am wondering if I should make coffee at 3 am before I call the Lyft or if I should wait until we get to the airport so I can wash the pot before we leave. Does my daughter’s TSA pre-check work or should we go to the airport extra early in case? If I pack cough syrup in little spice bottles will that be under the requisite 3 ounces to get through security? Holy crap! It doesn’t stop. I feel sorry for my traveling companions. I feel sorry for myself.

A therapist once told me that my brain thinks this way, in part as a coping strategy to a very chaotic childhood. I remember being in the car with my plastic grocery bag on my way to my dad’s house. He’d call to my sisters and me in the back seat, “Everyone got enough underpants?!” If we didn’t he’d stop at K-mart on the way and we’d grab some.

I am always prepared. For anything. For everything. I have two satellite bags in my everyday purse — one that has two kinds of lotion (hand and face), Advil, lip balm, bandaids, tweezers, dental floss, gum and hand sanitizer and another that has a pen, a pencil, a highlighter, a phone charger, old earphones, new earphones, ear plugs and post-it notes. I’m always ready. 

What would happen if I was unprepared? If I didn’t have a granola bar handy when I got hungry? If I had to use a thread from my shirt instead of floss to get the broccoli out of from between the molars on the upper left side of my mouth? What would happen if I was late to the airport? I really don’t know because it RARELY happens.

Once, when my daughter was four and we were visiting my mom in Chicago, she took us to O’Hare Airport and we got in terrible traffic. We ended up missing our flight and being stranded for hours. I remember leaving my daughter in the airport corridor with our luggage as I raced to the bathroom to pee, afraid the whole time that she’d be abducted or molested in the seven minutes I was gone. 

I also remember having ice cream with her at 10 am and again at noon. I remember sitting on top of our suitcases watching Dora the Explorer on her tiny DVD player. I remember her sense of adventure and acceptance. She wasn’t worried at all. As far as she was concerned, we were chillin’ in a giant room full of lots of people (and ice cream) and everything was fine.

I can’t prepare for everything. Can I really prepare for anything? No matter how many times I check my flight status, there’s no way to know if somehow ice will form on the wings in an unexpected cold snap. There’s no predicting if the pilot gets COVID or the Lyft driver gets a flat. I tell myself these things, but I still prepare. I’ll leave just a tiny bit earlier in case. I’ll pack a few extra pair of socks in case someone forgets their’s. There will always be a headlamp in my toiletries case if I need to read. 

Already things aren’t going as planned. I lost my glasses! But I have my old pair and I can use those. To get to our destination we’ll need to take three flights, multiple taxi rides, and a boat. There are so many possible ways things can go wrong, and they might. 

A few years ago I went to India. At the last minute, I gate checked my bag. After a grueling few days of travel, missing a connection in Dubai, finally arriving in Chennai, I learned that my suitcase was lost. On the way to my final destination I had the driver pull over to a shop I’d been to on my last trip. I bought a set of clothes and planned how I’d wash my bra and underpants while I slept that night. A friend gave me some disposable underwear, I brushed my teeth with my finger, and two days later my bag was found. The worst had happened and I had been okay.

As I prepare for this once in a lifetime trip I desperately want to change my narrative. I long to see the possibilities beyond the logistics, to chill out like my daughter did all those years ago. I know I can do it because I’ve done it before. I have a day and a half to figure this out, to embody the calmer me. Can I do it? I hope so. I’m really going to try.

Holiday Party

I don’t think about COVID every day like I used to. Slowly, like a sponge drying on the side of the sink, my brain has become less saturated with thoughts of the virus and more full of daily life as I knew it before COVID.

I know that COVID is still a concern. I am fully vaccinated and boosted. I wear my mask at work along with my co-workers. I’ve had COVID so I’m less fearful of getting it, but I’m not a denier by any stretch of the imagination. I do notice, though, that life feels more normal than it has in the last three years. I welcome this return to the ways things used to be.

This year we decided to resurrect our holiday party. It’s been several years since we had our annual party. It was my daughter’s question one morning, “Why don’t we have the cookie party anymore?”, that sparked the idea. It’s her last year at home before heading to college and that seemed like good enough reason to me.

I talked to my partner. She agreed we should have the party. And we started preparing. We would make mini-muffalettas, champagne punch, and lots of cookies. We spent many hours preparing for the party. We invited most of our friends and neighbors. We decorated the stairs around our house with luminaria. We were ready. During all of the party planning and preparations we never once talked about COVID.

Almost everyone who rsvped (and many who didn’t) came to the party. We had close to seventy people in our house — eating and drinking, talking, hugging, sharing bites of food, picking off of the same cheese board, taking cookies off the same tray.

I remember having friends over in the early days of COVID. We sat outside six feet apart and made separate serving trays of food so no one would touch the same utensils. We kept our visits short and quickly washed our friends dishes at the end of our outdoor gathering. We were afraid of each other. Hugging and touching was vorboten. 

Our holiday party started at 5PM. People came right on time. Over and over I’d answer the door, throw my arms around guest after guest, so happy to welcome them into our home. I must have hugged at least fifty people. I flitted around the party most of the night, filling people’s drinks, restocking the food, having short chats with various guests. No one wore a mask.

I watched the guests from the kitchen. They were like dozens of little stars twinkling around the room, moving from one star to another, star dust trailing behind them as they traveled to a new star to say hello and how have you been. Together, they made one beautiful constellation that lit up our home. I felt so grateful so many times.

The last guests left at 11:30PM. We put away all the food but left the rest. The next morning when we woke up, the remnants of the party were everywhere — plates of half-eaten food, punch still in the bowl, cups, napkins, crumbs everywhere.

While we cleaned the house we got text after text thanking us for the party. “Thank you for bringing us all together.” “So many great people!!” “Thank you for the wonderful party.” And we all had fun too. It really was a great party. 

The party was very much like has been in the past. We had the same food, many of the same people, the same champagne punch. But we were all so much hungrier for each other, so much more grateful to be together. 

From the very start of the party there was an electricity, a kind of vibration. I watched people move around the rooms, talking to different people. I watched faces light up and arms open wide for hugs. I saw heads tilting back in laughter and hands reaching out to touch an arm or share a toast. Though we had music playing it was barely audible. There was the non-stop hum of dozens of conversations happening at once. 

This energy is what we’ve been missing over the last three years. The connection that comes from one person making contact with another and then another and another. It’s the confluence of all of these energies combined that creates the magical hum and spark that we all noticed at the party. It’s love, connection, happiness.

It’s the exact opposite of what we’ve been doing since March 2020. With COVID we’ve had to turn away from contact to stay safe. And as a result we’ve lost the connection, the feeling of love and happiness that comes from being in a big group of people, some of whom you know very well, and some just a little bit. 

Since our party, I’ve been waiting for the COVID shoe to drop, for someone to call and tell me that they’re sick. So far no one at the party has called to tell me that they have COVID. I’d feel responsible and terrible. 

I know there are people who will tell me that this party was irresponsible, that COVID is not over yet. But I stand by my decision to gather my family, friends and neighbors together. We’ve been in the darkness for almost three years. Our twinkle has been dimmed for a long time. I know the party was a risk, but I’m glad we did it. I got to see the night sky of my community light up again, to feel that magical feeling of all the stars shining at once. It was as beautiful as I remember it and I can’t wait to do it again.