Keep It Simple Stupid

I’m six weeks into my international trip, and increasingly I’m bumping up against the question of what exactly it is that I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for this opportunity–particularly when I consider the many recent conversations I’ve had with Balinese and Vietnamese people. It’s an incredible privilege to be able to travel, yet that knowledge does nothing to reduce the urgency of the question when it arises in my mind. What am I doing with this time?

When I decided I would take three months to travel alone, I had a simple intention: practice listening to what I want. I knew the primary countries I would visit but I had no concrete list of things that I needed to see or do along the way. I wanted to give myself the space to make decisions in the moment.

So here I am in Vietnam with no agenda and nothing but time on my hands. I wake up and each day is a blank slate that I can fill with whatever I want. I know that this is an awesome “problem” to have. And yet many days I’m dogged by questions and doubts. Now what? What the heck am I doing? What’s the point of this?

When you strip away all of your responsibilities, when there isn’t a job to go to or a dog to take care of or a car that needs an oil change, you have an expanded sense of freedom. Prior to my trip I actually joked that I was going to enjoy the life of a dog—nothing to do but eat and sleep. At first I took advantage by doing things that I had previously considered luxuries: waking up without an alarm, going to yoga every day, and getting massages. I had to pinch myself because I couldn’t believe that I was in Bali and this was my life.

Days turned into weeks and while I was still enjoying these luxuries, the questions started to slowly creep in. What now? Am I really going to spend another day doing nothing? It’s not like I was choosing to scale mountains or learn to scuba dive. I was chatting with the owner of the coffee shop while he made my morning cup and taking long walks on the beach to watch the sun set. I was listening to my body and it was telling me to slow down and take it easy.

Each time the questions popped up, I reminded myself of my intention. Now what? Practice listening to what you want. What the heck am I doing? Practicing listening to what you want. Am I really going to spend another day just walking around and eating whatever looks good? If that’s what you want. I repeated this mantra to myself, but it felt thin. It didn’t feel like enough. Shouldn’t I be doing something with this time? Shouldn’t I be accomplishing something? Wasn’t there some greater meaning to all of this I was supposed to be discovering?

One afternoon I was wandering around the garden of a Buddhist monastery. It was charming and quiet, and there was this dusty pine scent that reminded me of a hundred happy hikes I’d done back home. As I strolled along a dirt path lined by dozens of bonsai trees, the questions caught up with me. In response, I looked closely at one of the bonsais, noticing its thick trunk despite its short stature, imagining the care with which the needles had been trimmed back, recognizing that this tree has witnessed more time than I will ever know. For the briefest of moments my attention was entirely focused on the little tree as my senses drank it in. And in that fleeting moment I had the answer to my question. What the heck am I doing? Looking at a bonsai tree.

Just then I realized how much my mind likes to complicate things. Not content to experience the present moment as is, it runs all over the place–wanting to frame this trip as some epic adventure, wanting to weave some fantastic universal truth out of my experiences, wanting to capture breathtaking photos to post to social media to impress my friends. But none of that is why I’m here. My intention was to practice listening to what I want, and that’s really quite simple to do. The hard part, as it turns out, is not giving in to these silly questions and the “shoulds” that are subconsciously trying to thwart my honest work.

There is nothing to accomplish. There is nothing that I should be doing. That’s just my mind trying to distract me from being present in the moment. If I continue to listen to myself and give my full attention to the experiences that I choose, my travels will be an even greater gift to myself than I could have ever imagined. That's what I'm doing with this time. 

Come Up For Air

A few weeks ago I had an incredible opportunity to travel to Mexico with a conservation organization. I was drawn to the trip because it included whale watching in an area where gray whales frequently stop as they migrate up the coast. I had been whale watching once before in Oregon. Though I saw just one at a distance, I can easily remember how excited I was to see the spout shooting skyward.

So you can probably imagine the pure joy I felt when I saw my first gray whale spy hop from the ocean a mere fifty feet away, or the awe I felt when a whale surfaced alongside the boat and curled right underneath us, swimming so shallowly that I could see the barnacles clinging to its skin. The whales were beautiful, and for moments at a time my attention was captured by my senses–the sights, the sounds, the smells. Watching them I felt a humble mix of wonder, love, and camaraderie.

On my last day in Mexico, we were driving through a seemingly endless desert when I saw a small group of cows ahead. They were lying on the edge of the road, forcing the driver to perform an evasive maneuver. I was surprised and delighted to see these cows, and in my excitement I made some unintelligible exclamation (as I sometimes do). The guide turned around in his seat to look at me and laughed. He said, “You’re more excited about seeing cows than whales!” I laughed, too, because as I thought about his comment, he sort of had a point.

My daydreams about this trip had been saturated by my desire to see whales. What we saw or did the rest of the time didn’t really matter to me, so long as I had an experience with a whale. Yet the entire trip provided moments just as worthy of my rapt attention, like watching the sunrise over the mountains from the roof of the hotel or the sandpipers scurrying away from the waves on little stick legs that looked much too delicate for their bodies. If I had only paid attention to my number one priority, thinking that the rest wasn’t as important, I would have missed out on so many beautiful moments. I would have missed out on those sleepy cows, which I can honestly remember as vividly as the whales in all their majesty.

Yet how often do I do this in day-to-day life, so set on accomplishing one task that I miss out on the moments along the way? So determined to learn a song on the guitar that I don’t feel the way the sound cocoons me each time I play a note. So focused on willing my dog to poop before I leave for the day that I don’t notice the daffodils are starting to bloom. So fixated on getting dinner in the oven that I don’t notice the bright colors of the vegetables I am chopping.

Our rush to cross the finish line prevents us from experiencing where we are right now with focused attention. Instead one moment blurs into the next and the next until we accomplish the thing we set out to do, feeling a brief happiness in our achievement before setting our sights on a new destination and starting over. If we can slow down and give our attention to the entire journey, as if each moment matters, we can more fully experience our lives.

This might be easier to practice while on vacation in Mexico than at my office or the grocery store, but I’m still going to try. The number of moments in my life won’t change, but I’ll be present in more of them.

Choose Your Focus, The Remix

This morning I was listening to an interview that Mary Oliver gave to Krista Tippett for the radio show On Being. Mary Oliver is my favorite poet, and I fell even more in love with her and her work as I listened to the conversation. Krista mentioned that paying attention seemed to be a common theme in Mary's body of poetry, to which Mary readily agreed. She has spent much of her life wandering through the woods near her home with notebook in hand, giving her full attention to the natural world and being inspired by what she has witnessed. 

Her arguably most famous poem, "The Summer Day," specifically mentions paying attention and seems like a beautiful exclamation point to my musings about being mindful from earlier this week. Every time I read this poem, I get to the end and just sit quietly with awe at the magnitude of that question. What am I going to do with this one life?

I am realizing that the answer starts with a much smaller but equally important question. What am I going to do with this moment?

My answer? I'm going to pay attention.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?