When Letting Go, Create a new Vision

He says to me, "We need to talk tonight. I've been thinking about Jessara."
I'm slow to respond, stunned actually because I realize that he's been giving a lot of thought to something that I wasn't thinking about. Oh boy, I've got to prepare myself; I want to put off what I think is coming and ask if we can talk about it after dinner.

Sure.

As we clean up the dinner dishes, he brings it up again and I realize that I had completely forgotten about his request to talk - I'd put it out of my mind completely. I'm slightly amused at my brain's protective capacity.

The conversation unfolds.

He's been thinking about all the things we've talked about the last few months (our youngest heading off to college next fall, how we want to restructure our lives, the things we've talked about doing) and Jessara, our boat of eight years, is an 'anchor' around our financial health. Up to this point in our lives, that's been okay. We've had such grand adventures on her as a family that the costs were always worth it. We aren't using her very much anymore and she does what every boat does - she sits in the water and breaks.


Jessara off of Spencer's Spit, Lopez Island, WA

He looked up how much it would be to charter a boat - a lot less than it costs to keep one. He continues to give solid, reasonable reasons why it is a good idea for us to sell her now.

As he talks, I feel myself pulling Jessara in closer and closer to my heart.

No! Don't ask me to give her up quite yet. I don't care what I said six months ago about not going to Alaska - don't make this a logical, rational decision! So what if I'm the one who pinned you down to talk about the possibility of selling her next year...

I'm the one that cracked this conversation open in the first place and there I stood, holding on tighter than I ever had. It was like the hug you give someone that you love when you don't know if you'll see them again. It's tight and bittersweet, longer with a reluctant release. But the release has to come. You have to let go. I couldn't disagree with any of his reasons, I understood, and yet...it hurt. This man I'm married to then did something quite amazing. With an off hand comment that brought back another conversation that I had forgotten, he says, "I took a look at some of those little teardrop trailers online."

I've been forgetting a lot of things, obviously.

The death hold I had on Jessara eased off a little bit. If I was a dog, my ears would have perked forward. It was a baited hook with a different vision. The beauty of it was that he was letting me know, for the first time, the ways in which he was beginning to envision our empty nest. This wasn't me poking and prodding the poor guy - he was poking me back and pointing out that without a boat, we could pursue new adventures in new ways. He was embracing tangible possibilities - and had been - but on his own time scale. This was news to me because only a few months ago he had told me that he needed the next year to just think about change. All the possibilities that I kept talking about were raising his anxiety. We made a pact to keep everything in the 'contemplation' stage until 2015. Which was why I was surprised by what I was hearing. I was also moved.

I realized that we process life's questions in different ways which includes different time frames. He needed to have the time to think about life in the empty nest from his own perspective which tends to include things like budgets, 401k's, savings and costs. Not just those things, but they show up more in his thinking than mine.  I can't begin to tell him how much I appreciate this in our relationship. He's a programmer - logic is the language he loves. And yet he is married to me, a woman who had to drop Logic as a class because I hated it. Ack - all those rules drove me crazy.

One of the many choices - More about Serro Scotty Trailers

So there we were. Making a major decision to change the way we live by selling our boat.

I cried a few tears of sadness - because letting go needs to honored - and then sat quietly for a long moment before I looked up, a gleam in my eye and asked -

"Do you know how many National Parks there are in this country?"

He just sighed - and smiled.



A little bit about Jessara can be found at Jessara's Voyage

Who Says You Can't Go Back?

How many times do you get to share a memory laden place with not only the person who brought you there in the first place but with the person you’ll keep going there with for decades to come?

I’ve said this before – The Eastern Sierras are one of those places on the planet that I love. Going back yet again with my dad this summer was a wonderful treat. Taking Andy along was an added bonus. These two men, both loved so dearly by me, made the time together even better.

It wasn’t always the case that these two guys got along. During the first few years of our marriage, my dad might have used Andy for target practice instead of getting out there and shooting tin cans and targets together. To see how time has shifted their relationship into one of caring and friendship has been one of the blessings in my life.

We hiked and we fished. Yes, we went target shooting way out beyond Mono Lake. We drank wine and cooked together. We told stories and reminisced.  My dad and Andy shared stories about their youthful adventures in car ownership. Dad re-told stories from past fishing trips with his brother. When we drove by a particular turn in a creek, dad would point out to Andy where I caught my limit of trout that first time or where we camped or where a particular trailhead was that we, his daughters, still grouse about that hike he took us on.

Occasionally my dad would say, “Well, you never know when one’ll be back down here to see this again.” He’s in his mid-seventies and while still active and healthy, it’s there in his mind’s eye:  Age is changing the way he does things. “It used to be,” he says thoughtfully, “that I could just get up, pack the trailer, get everything ready to go without a thought. Now I have to go over it in my head the night before. I make lists.” 

I didn’t tell him that I do that now all the time. He was marking the differences for himself – what has changed over fifty years of adulthood. But there is a way that he says it that tells me just how much he thinks living a full life is worth any of the little troubles that aging is bringing to his doorstep. He is a happy man. Truly, deeply happy.  He doesn’t complain about getting older or get maudlin about what living used to be like – dad just figures out the ways he can keep doing what he really loves doing.

There are times when he quietly lets go and holds on to happy memories that remind him of what living a full, vibrant life can give you. "I have wonderful memories," he says, "I hold on to what makes me happy, reminds me how lucky I am."

I don’t know how much longer he’ll be able to pull his trailer down to the Sierras and neither does he. He takes it one summer at a time. We did talk about how much gas he would save bringing his little compact car down – he could afford to rent one of those cabins near the market in Lee Vining. Like I said, he keeps figuring out other ways to do what he wants to do.

Finding happiness as we get older is tricky. I think it is far too easy to concentrate on loss and regrets instead of figuring out what happiness looks like. Maybe contentment is another word that we have a hard time making sense of. Is it possible to find contentment and still strive for a life well lived? As I head towards fifty, I have to say that my father has helped me see that aging doesn’t have to be a bloody throw-down battle.

Striving for happiness, letting go of what doesn’t serve anymore, and learning how to discover contentment are a recipe for aging well.

Tour Group Junkie I am not…

The Adriatic makes me feel at home

I’m sitting in the last hotel on a long itinerary list that has taken my daughter and I to six countries in 16 days. It’s been a fascinating trip – lots of history, culture, amazing scenery and ... interaction with 24 other members of our tour group.

Other than the guide, we were all Americans and came from every corner of the States in order to travel through the heart of Europe. I would guess that the average age of most of the travelers was over fifty – but we had five teenage girls sprinkled among three families and that kind of messes with the numbers. Most of the adults were professionals from a range of fields – teaching, business, law, medicine, finance. Oh, and one politician – but his wife was a kindergarten teacher so we forgave him.

We had in common a desire to learn, travel and be on time.

The rest of the group had something in common that I didn’t share: they had all traveled extensively on tours like this before. I believe that most everyone had been on a Rick Steve’s tour prior to this one – sometimes four or five – even the teenagers. At the first dinner, listening to them practically wax poetic about these tours got me a little worried.

Because I already knew this whole tour thing was going to be a love/hate relationship from the beginning.

I'm not all that contrary but I think it's safe to say that I'm a fairly independent person (and getting more independent with each passing year). I like to eat what I want to eat, go where I want to go. I like quiet. I don't really like small talk. If you've ever been on a tour somewhere in the world, you're starting to get the picture, right?

I loved the fact that I didn’t have to get out the road maps and find hotels in Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Croatia. On the other hand, finding your own way around a country is a great way to really connect to the places you are traveling through. That doesn’t really happen when one is on a touring bus, reading a book to pass the time.

I loved having a local guide (A Hungarian gentleman trained as a history teacher) who made all the transfers, travel, tours of sites happen seamlessly. He was smart, funny and very patient with his gaggle of Americans. I really treasured the personal stories that he shared.

I didn’t like the group meals where the decibel levels climbed so high you couldn’t talk to the person next to you. There’s a stereotype about loud Americans – we confirmed it. I don’t think our guide is going to be able to book that last restaurant again in Lake Bled.

Don’t misunderstand; it only takes a few boisterous people to crank up the volume. And for some people, it only takes one drink before they cut loose and get really annoying. For the most part, our touring companions were delightful, easy going and interesting – and it’s pretty much a given that I’ll never see them again. With a few folks, that leaves me conflicted and wistful.

View from Prague Castle

I asked many of my fellow travelers about their past experiences, what they liked, what didn’t work. This was a pretty savvy group of travelers who talked about past tours where most of people were “Rick Steve’s Junkies”.  I didn’t mention that that had been exactly my first impression of this particular group. They talked about groups that didn’t gel – and I wondered what that would look like. Apparently it has to do with at least three single women traveling in the same tour who are rotating roommates with each other or a solo traveler who was a lot more incapacitated then they should have been on an active tour. Issues that screw up a tour group seem to center around member dynamics - not tour logistics - which is magnified by the forced community that is a tour group. I realized how lucky we had gotten with our relatively easy going group. Sure there were some moments when I had to bite my tongue or put my headphones on.  I watched a couple people make complete idiots out of themselves – which I probably did at some point as well. My daughter could probably list off a couple of dozen of those moments so who am I to judge?

I have no complaints about this tour – it was a fabulous learning experience. Touring multiple countries in such a short time serves a purpose and I knew it’s not my preferred way to travel. However, I feel that traveling is necessary to continually come up against my own ignorance and cultural blinders. Walking through a series of countries that were “behind the iron curtain” less than thirty years ago is humbling. Standing on the old railroad tracks at Birkenau is horrifying. 

Travel not only brings history alive but it lets you breathe in the subtle and profound ways our cultural heritages weave together and produce a human cultural heritage that is bigger than any one country, language, religion or belief system.

And that realization, above and beyond anything else that I experienced will keep me traveling this wide world of ours as long as I am able. I might – someday – even do another tour.