Sometimes the rest of the world, or at least certain people in it, can feel very far away from things we understand.  A friend told me the other day that they have started with the very basic commonalities in others such as, “we’ve all got hair!”

​I remembered this the other day while standing in line at the bank on a Monday afternoon, observing all of our costumes.  Mondays at the bank are interesting in this way: we all wear our occupations, um, “on our sleeves” so to speak.  There was the man in front of me in a crisp white shirt and black dress slacks, and the woman in front of in front of him in her comfy supportive shoes and food service apron still clinging to her waist.  There was the woman in scrubs and orthopedic shoes, and the man with his mechanic’s coveralls embroidered with the name of the shop, and there was me in dirty jeans and work boots.

There we were, from all sorts of different occupations (and perhaps walks of life), with this mundane task in common.  We all need to go to the bank (assuming we don’t just stick cash in a mattress).  I didn’t know any of these people standing in line with me at the bank, but I knew, at the very basic level, that we all had this one thing in common: we needed to go to the bank.  And even that can be a starting point of connection in a world that can feel so far away.

​There is an old Ani DiFranco song lyric: “the butter melts out of habit, the toast isn’t even warm”, that’s been playing on repeat in my head since last Wednesday.  Wednesdays are one of the wake-up-at-stupid-o’clock-go-go-go long days that begin early and end late.  And I am rarely the best iteration of myself on those mornings, at least pre-coffee.  But I’ve been practicing.  Not practicing the wake-up-at-stupid-o’clock so much (I try to avoid that as much as possible), but practicing training my brain.

​I heard someone put it this way the other day: our thoughts/reactions are like water wearing a path through the limestone-they create easy pathways for automatic reactions, for habits.  But we can build a dam in those pathways and force the water to forge an alternate path.  This is what I’ve been practicing. And Wednesday, I noticed the practice paying off (which is good because I can get lazy about practice, just ask my mom about those seven years of piano lessons).

I gathered all my supplies for the long day, including my travel mug full of hot coffee.  As I was headed out the door, I noticed my back feeling very warm and realized that the travel mug lid was open and almost all the coffee had spilled out in my bag. The automatic “woe-is-me, this is how this day is going to go” reaction kicked in followed by Jason’s “let me take care of it” reaction, but I noticed my heart just really wasn’t in it.  The alternate route for the water was forged just enough so that not all of the water was running through the “woe-is-me” route.  Just enough so that even though my body was acting out of habit (big sigh), underneath that auto-pilot reaction, it just didn’t feel like that big of a deal.  Which it wasn’t, of course, but that hasn’t historically stopped me from acting like it was—like the world was somehow out to get me as evidenced by this early morning coffee spill.
This is the beauty of middle age.  I’ll never understand the obsession with youth in this culture.  I find the most joy in middle age, when I’ve had time and experience enough to learn that I have control over my own experience.  Perhaps some folks find this enlightenment earlier in life, but I was not one of those people.  And so I find myself enjoying middle age immensely, and only looking forward to the next phase, where I suspect even more joy awaits. 

I made a point a few years ago to prioritize fun.  If anyone asks, I’ll maintain that this is a very good idea.  The only problem is that by prioritizing fun doesn’t always mean that something less fun has to go away.  Not that farming is not fun, it definitely is, but it’s still work, and it has a seasonal ebb and flow.  Spring is a giant ebb.  It demands “ultra” full time (like an “ultra marathon”) including early mornings and late evenings and all the running in between.  But I don’t want to kick out fun, so I power through like a proper dictator: “you WILL do this and it WILL be fun!”

​In that spirit, I’ve been flying through the last month.  You may have noticed (I hope you noticed, but you probably didn’t and there’s no need to tell me about that😊), that there has been no blog in the last two weeks.  I’ve been running around chasing fun  while still cramming in ultra full time farm work.  I had no plans to end this insanity this weekend, but accidental fate intervened.

You see, I spent a long “lunch” after market on Saturday reconnecting with my closest friends, then drove home, set an alarm to get up to chase the borealis with some friends, looked at river levels and picked one to paddle the next day, texted paddling friends to arrange it, and took a “quick nap”.  My alarm went off at 9:30, I got up to find the address where we were to meet our friends for sky gazing and there were no texts.  Nor was there a text from our paddling friends about paddling the next day.  So I rolled over and went back to sleep for the night.

The next morning greeted me with continued radio silence and we decided to rest, relax, and do very little on Sunday instead of driving 4 plus hours to find enough water to paddle.  I discovered somewhere mid-morning, when it was too late to get any real coordination of paddling in motion, that I had accidentally turned my phone on airplane mode.  So the “radio silence” was actually just an accidental intervention of fate, or subconscious, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it.  But I will tell you now: it was exactly what my body needed after two weeks of non-stop.  I feel quite rested now, thank you, and the grass is mowed and the laundry washed and put away, and the house, well, relatively cleanish. And I’m ready for the next round of non-stop.