News from Jules | 02.06.2023 | Ready to Go
Three weeks ago my car wouldn’t start. After a year of road-tripping some 10,000 miles all over the United States in 2022, it broke down a mile from my storage unit in Portland, Ore.
As if to say: I’m tired. Aren’t we done yet?
I’d been wondering the same thing—about purging, about Portland, about traveling.
I was tired too but I didn’t break down. I took deep breaths, stayed focused on each step one at a time, and figured out what needed to be done.
I agreed to the $800 estimate so the Volkswagen mechanic could order the car part before the weekend. They said it would take a week for delivery, so AAA towed my car over to my friend’s house nearby for safekeeping in her quiet neighborhood. Fortunately, I could use my bike to get to appointments around town and borrow cars to still finish my storage unit downsizing project by the end of the month.
My life is wildly free-flowing right now and yet some planning is required. A week felt doable but I started to get antsy as the days ticked away toward two weeks and the car part hadn’t arrived yet.
Phew! The car part finally came in last Thursday—the day before I was rescheduled to depart. I would have been on the road down to Northern California and then over to Bend, Ore. to visit my friends. But, a different part broke. And the closest replacement needed to be shipped from California, ironically. Estimated to arrive on Tuesday.
So I had to postpone my plans again.
Disappointed, discouraged, and powerless.
I was so ready to go.
I was so ready to see Grandmother Ocean, to smell the salt air, to meet my best friend’s baby, to hug the Redwoods, to hike high up in the mountains, to play in the snow.
It wasn’t just that I needed to get back to nature so desperately, but that I felt like I had already been in limbo for a while—three months of recovery since surgery and complications, months on the road, then over a month of being home for the holidays—and was ready for a finish line.
When I finish my purging project, when I get out of the city, when I get settled in a small town.
Almost content like Anushka Fernadndopulle, my meditation teacher of the “Insights III” course on Ten Percent Meditation App, described the other day.
She said: Many times we think “I’m going to be happy when I get to this”…We have this sense that happiness is always just around the corner when we reach this point in the future. So it’s helpful to notice how this isn’t actually happening. Each time we get to that point, the finish line seems to move. We can’t rely on putting our happiness at the end of some imaginary finish line that keeps moving forward.
After the call from the mechanic, I moped amongst the paths through the few giant Sequoias curated in the nearby park. I kept thinking of the true meaning of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”
I recently learned that we’ve misinterpreted its meaning for over 100 years. It’s not as much about free will, individualism or non-conformity. It’s about being satisfied.
According to Torbjørn Ekelund, in his book “In Praise of Paths”:
“The story goes that Robert Frost first composed the poem as a joke for the poet Edward Thomas, who always struggled in making decisions. As with most of the poem’s readers, Thomas never grasped the poem’s irony and took it to be an insult from his friend.
Robert Frost’s biographer, Lawrance Thompson, writes that the poems narrator is a person who habitually wastes his energy because he regrets all the things he has decided for and sighs over those he’s decided against. He also claims that during readings, Frost would often say the poem’s narrator…was a person who ‘No matter which road he took, he always wished he’d taken another.’”
These were the roads actually diverging in the woods before me: I could keep moping around all weekend bemoaning that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. Or I could make the best of being where I didn’t want to be.
What could I do with a few additional, unplanned days here?
Rock climbing with one of my climbing partners
A long training hike in Forest Park
Finish a long novel
Lots of self-care: sleeping in, meditating, yoga, and physical therapy
My online photography class assignment
Complete my taxes
Write my newsletter
Not just a long list of ideas, that’s what I actually did. And I was happy about it every day.
“Like with any journey, it’s not what you carry, but what you leave behind,” said Robyn Davidson, in Tracks, one of my favorite based-on-a-true-story films about her solo trek 1,700 miles across Australia.
I’m still hoping the car part comes in tomorrow so I can head out on the road again.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
May you be happy right here this week.
Love,
Jules