TREK, RAMBLE, SCRAMBLE, or stay home
Sunday, May 23, 2021
No harm resting here.
Being a little downgrade, sunken, hangdog, or malcontent – familiar enough descriptions of doleful feelings, ones too often deemed politically incorrect for polite company. Many prefer roses and sunshine, smoke and mirrors, or just plain smoke …
I’m not a happy glamper.
Not much amusement to discuss, especially when everyone is buzzing around, or it’s noisy, or strangers are listening because being down is only for one.
Besides, for me, loneliness is only me being with me, and I share that with some sadness and concern for many others in the same boat. Someone reminded me recently of something BP wrote to me last year: we aren’t all in the same boat – we’re navigating the same storm but in very different boats.
For campers and glampers, this weekend is their busy-away adventure, and for those who stay home alone, it’s a condition you cannot cure with over-dozing Netflix or restacking a pile of books on your nightstand.
Slowing things down is a mental game at best …
Nothing slows down.
We can, however, make a pit stop for self-repair and self-reliance.
Take a breath, please.
Nobody has time, yet there is always time, every time we want there to be. So it’s not a forced set of alternatives where we must pick from a range of the available options – but every action is chosen.
Gloomy silence, damp, cloudy day …
Yesterday was one of those. We need afternoons of nothing, don’t we? Not the idea of them, but taking a day to let the tension in our shoulders relax reality, not to be darting around like a nervous lab-rat checking on the replies to that last text or checking an auto-feed, email or phone message.
Gloom doesn’t vanish, but it’s brightened with some music.
Some reading, some writing, a few emails, catching up on newspapers, moving some boxed around the way you rearrange deck chairs on a ship, not doing anything in particular beyond altering the scenery.
But that’s what quiet, solitary days are for – idly looking out a window or peering into the future of distance, or is that the distance of future?
It’s far away and doesn’t matter to anyone else.
As I wrote this column, listening to some jazz/piano mix on a YouTube feed, I was wondering if I’d ever taken up the piano if I’d be tinkering on those 88 keys rather than this keyboard of an overcast Saturday. Some days it’s the piano keys that tell a better story than words on a page. Notes of music soothe us – those phrases move us emotionally, if not physically.
Sunday afternoons and Saturday afternoons are interchangeable – they don’t look a lot different if you make them into any Thursday.
The pandemic war is, we are told, nearly won.
Declaring that we’ve won any war seems perverse when the third world is reeling, and we’re still under substantial restrictions – but blunting the curve again makes headline writers euphoric, so happy to be writing different bad-news captions again …
It’s hard to think about winning the peace when the war is still raging.
After the war, we should have peace, but we don’t get to decide that individually – it’s a national mob-think social-media soup of everybody wanting to know what everybody else is doing, ache-want and longing-for so that someone can fulfill our desires.
What comes next will be hyperbolic economic genuflections as our pendulum resumes a comfortable resting place – not in the middle, or widely left or right, but quite simply STILL. For a while. For a Saturday afternoon of soft jazz piano.
One thing I used to enjoy in my younger camping days was not the sleeping on lumpy ground part or cooking on a Coleman stove perched on a wobbly picnic table or washing dishes in a cold mountain stream, but the reliability of one of humanity’s oldest inventions and social conventions to bring people together, the humble campfire; I found this combo to share – happy weekend everyone.
Have a campfire, or send one to someone – then curl up in your high thread-count sheets and have a great sleep – that’s my kind of glamping. If you do it somewhere with room service, all the better. I recommend either the Jasper Park Lodge or the Emerald Lake Lodge – doing what they do best long before the word glamping entered the vernacular.
So, fairy godmother, I’m not a happy glamper – but I would like to be, so please wave your magic wand and put in cabin 24 or 25, an upper unit please, at Emerald Lake and I’ll never complain about anything again, ever, I promise to grin constantly.
Reader feedback:
Whether no one is sticking up for us or everyone is sticking up for us, it is easier with a few hugs. I have missed human touch during this pandemic, but as we continue to get vaccinated, hugs are once again a possibility. At the height of the andemic, my dog was the only recipient of my hugs. So happy to be able to hug my friends again. So happy I wrote about it: jmaydaze.com/2021/05/20/to-hug-again/ , JM, Seattle, WA