Visby, Sweden. If there is a better place to eat french fries I have not found it (but I won’t stop looking, either).
I have been compared to a gerbil, a squirrel, a shark, and a hummingbird, and probably a few other animals no one has told me about yet.
“You look like Harvey,” Sariah says. I ask who Harvey is and discover he is her class gerbil. In her defense, I was in the kitchen eating salad directly out of a bag with my hands.
“Do you know what animal you’re most like?” Debbie and Scarlett ask this one, when we are on our Baltic cruise. Before I can answer, they tell me they already know. A hummingbird. There is no need to argue their selection because it makes complete sense.
Squirrels and sharks, the same basic idea. I must keep moving! I might dart away at a moment’s notice, ready for fight or flight (but most likely flight). It’s annoying, according to some people. Who I am is annoying. Also, exhausting.1
I have a moment eleven years ago where I should have realized I am no longer married to the right person. My ex-husband says, out of nowhere, that he thinks travel is just vanity and a waste of time. I am completely shocked and appalled, because I thought we had the exact same plan - have our children early, be done early. We’ll only be 48 when our youngest graduates from high school. So young! Then travel. Go everywhere, everywhere I have longed to go my whole life but couldn’t, because of children, financial constraints, and well, also a husband who literally said I couldn't. Instead of pushing back hard or realizing I need to leave this whole scene and this man who appears to see the world very differently, I quietly die inside, thinking I am stuck here.
When he tells me he wants a divorce two months later, he also says that I walk on eggshells around him. I argue. No I don’t! Except, yes I did. He is right about this. I am full hummingbird, full squirrel, full Harvey, full shark. Afraid of attack and completely unable to relax, and this is largely because I don’t even know what relaxing is anymore. I have forgotten how to be still, if I ever even knew in the first place, and I am not sure I did.
Less than a year later, I am starting to figure it out, becasue I have found the person with whom I can be still. In a letter to Mike on May 27, 2015 I say this:
I am sure you know that yoga and running keep me sane. It’s how I think and how I process, because just sitting there is hard for me. In fact, being with you is just about the only thing that ever makes me just want to sit and be. I don’t feel restless when I am in your arms.
At this point, we have only even known each other for three and a half months (in this lifetime). It comes up again two years later, when Mike is in the hospital. The nurse in the ICU calls me Mike’s “magic wife” because when I am there, his heart rate goes down. Mike tells her it is not magic but love. But it is both of those things and it is also stillness. I have told this story before but it is an important one, a story that keeps giving, a story that is relevant to many discussions and topics. Mike’s heart rate goes down and mine does too, because we can be still together. Our nervous systems recognize safety.
Mike teaches me to find stillness, because he is looking for it too. His brain is extra hardwired for fight or flight (in his case, more likely fight). But together, we can just be. I no longer need to read myself into exhaustion to fall asleep. He is less plagued by nightmares. I flee less. He fights less. We sit more and sleep more. We camp in places with no cell phone service.
And we go places, in general. I start to travel the way I always dreamed of traveling. And even traveling, I find stillness. Sometimes hummingbirds land on a flower and their wings quit moving for a second. Two, even.
I read The NewYorker’s indictment of travel this week.2 There are some valid points. Travel has become competitive. People just want to snap their picture in front of the leaning tower of Pisa or Angkor Wat so they can announce they have been, show everyone, and check it off their list before they move onto the next thing. When you travel it’s travel, but when other people do it it’s tourism. I mean, maybe. But the woman who writes it, who glorifies staying home, went to a falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi. Walked all around Paris so that her walking map looked like spokes in a bicycle wheel. We think travel changes us, she says, but does it? I want to protest that she is shutting the door now that she’s walked through it already. My twenties and thirties were spent raising babies, and with four young children you don’t get to dart anywhere. And also, what do we know about other people’s travel motives, their bucket lists, or their dreams? Does travel have to change us?
The oldest pub in Ireland is not as fun as The Hairy Lemon (Bonnie was right as she often is).
My letter to my husband and essays on travel both lead me back to the same thoughts, back to stillness and my search for it. We don’t always get this right. The oldest pub in Ireland is full of Americans, not Irish people, and sometimes I am still the woman I was eleven years ago, the one who was afraid I was not ever going to be able to go places now, or the one frantic to see Chichen Itza because what are my odds of getting back here? I must see everything, because this might be my only chance!
With Mike I learn stillness, at home and elsewhere. On a campground, on a cruise ship. In a touristy restaurant in Cozumel where they play Margaritaville so much I wonder if the staff is tempted to puncture their own eardrums to escape, but also the coconut margarita is really good. I don’t have to see everything in Cozumel, which probably does not have a falcon hospital anyway. I am also learning that it is not actually possible to see everything.
I learn about stillness from Debbie, who is better at it than I am. I learn that one of the best things you can do in a foreign city is sit outside and eat french fries. We do this in Visby and Tallinn and Stockholm and I surprise myself by discovering that when you sit in a city you can almost feel it breathe. You might see more if you’re moving like a shark, but you might also feel a little less.
I don’t have this all figured out, not by a long shot. I am still searching for stillness, still finding it. It is in Ft. Logan, leaning on my husband’s grave, knowing that my body will one day be resting and seeing the same mountains and sky. It is at home, at night, with the rain falling on our roof.3 It is eating french fries in Visby and thinking our waitress is maybe the most beautiful woman in the world. It is finding other people I can be still with, even if one of them is me. Maybe even lower my heart rate enough to
put down my bag of salad.
stop looking for a predator
land on a flower and still my wings…just for a second. Two, maybe.
If you are wondering whether I have ADHD, I have wondered the same thing. Except it was never hard to sit in class? And I could always just imagine something different if I got bored?
I am led there by this Substack, which I like much more.
In letters, Mike likes to emphasize our so I do it too.
Beautiful piece. Love your voice-the footnotes are brilliant.
I love this piece. xoxo