Paying attention - #138

Unmarked trails and trodden paths.

Like anywhere with unmarked trails, we make up names for them: Upper and Lower Yurt Trail, the River Trail, Waterfall, Swamp, the Engine Room, we name them after the mines they climb to and for the ruins they pass. And in our valley, these trails snake across and around each other, playing tag with game trails, old mining roads, and merely the suggestion of having been walked on by one creature or another. 

I myself have picked up an old trail: therapy. I originally started seeking out therapy in 2014 because my brother fell ill, and I was overwhelmed with fear that I would too. It took a few tries before I found her, My Therapist, but once I did, I saw her for six years. Six years! We met almost every week from mid 2015 to early 2021, right before I left the Santa Monica Mountains for much bigger ones. Our departure was sweet, a graduation of sorts, but she left the door open specifically for if I did eventually decide to have a kid. 

I did have a kid, and so, every other Tuesday we meet online. When we’d left each other, we were running out of things to work on. I assumed that our reunion would focus on the baby, at least one entire session dedicated to me complaining about people telling me it goes fast, as if I’ve just arrived, as if I’ve never felt time pass. 

“So, is the novel done?”

She had decided to take time passing in a different direction.

You should’ve seen my face, and I did see it, in the corner of the Zoom all eyebrows and teeth, having made it essentially no further on any of my work-in-progress novels in three years. I explained the newsletter. After all, this project started some five months after therapy ended. My beloved therapist had no idea I’d written over 130 essays of over 200,000 words to over 6,000 people, I said with increasing fervor. Six thousand people! I emphasized to her, and definitely not to myself as I googled crowd size images. Shouldn’t I be proud?

“But, you do still want to write a novel, right?”

What was this? I felt myself looking left, looking right, like can you believe this gal? I was successful! Sort of! 

“Yeah, of course.”

Now she was squinting, considering her next move. Get on with it. Just say it.

“Is the newsletter maybe just another way to not do the work?”

I closed the link on crowd sizes. 

As Ben and I figure out the new shape of our lives (small, lanky, droopy cheeked), we’re making lists, we’re naming our trails. There’s almost nothing even on my list. It’s very short. It goes:

• Keep baby alive

• Keep self alive

• Read something

• Write something

• Repot the climbing aloe

• Make money

Perhaps if I give the climbing aloe the freedom to dream, I will also be giving it to myself. 

The other day, we were doing a Zillow check. We were looking at little shacks out on the mesa and considering selling our house for one of them. We’d be mortgage free, we could take our time, we could slow down. But we’d also be alone. There would be no morning drop-ins from neighbors. There would be no best dog friend across the street. No incredible trail network out our front door. No house we’d dreamed of. But there would be money — and sweet, sweet time. 

Time is all strangers talk to me about now. It is rare that someone asks me a question. Instead, it’s as if the nostalgia coils them like a snake, wrapping tighter and tighter, hissing into their ear, sssay it, say it to her.

“It goes so fast!” they all yell. “Appreciate every moment!” they choke out. “Slow down,” they wheeze as the last bit of air escapes them. 

I know the comments come in good faith, and yet, I bristle at them. Maybe I was always a pedant, maybe it just happens after ten years of being with someone who definitely is, but I can’t help but register these sentiments as commands. They’re not inquiries or curiosities, they’re not wistful longings to correct their own behaviors — they’re orders. No one asks, “what’s the cutest thing he does so far?” or “what’s your favorite thing to do together?” No one is even bold enough to ask if I’m able to appreciate it. They simply tell me to, as if no one does. As if everyone is broiled in regret. 

Woods and I have hiked nearly 200 miles together already. We have walked and walked and walked the old trails that have been walked on for over a century, we have explored some odd ones either forgotten or forging, and we’ve even embarked on some new ones. I’m using a GPS service to map them all so we can print it large and hang it in the house. A tangible guide to the woods, for Woods. Trails, when unmaintained, get lost. But when you find them again, there is a magic to them. I’m never sad I didn’t spend years walking that trail, appreciating it and etching it from the growth. I’m only ever happy to find it again. 

Every year, autumn reveals old paths. If only for a few weeks when the flora has died back and the snow has not yet arrived, you can see faint paths like pen marks left from the sheet above. It is fleeting, but if you pay attention, you can find them. That’s all autumn ever really demands, our attention. Every year we give it, and yet, we lament the passing. Our attention was never enough. 

A child is an autumn. They are ever fleeting and falling, changing into something else as you try to capture what just was. The nostalgia is built in, not just for who they were last week, or even yesterday, but who you were. You were once so small, a leaf, waiting to turn. It is an easy pattern to repeat, to wish you appreciated the colors more, but nostalgia is just a stronger flavor than gratitude, and since it is inevitably the dessert, it can overpower the subtleties of stopping to watch a single leaf fall from the sky. You did appreciate it, but a moment is merely a moment. It’s not meant to last. That is a memory’s work, and don’t the best memories all come seasoned with a bit of nostalgia?

It goes so fast, the fall. But it goes how it always goes. Maybe a bit faster in the wind, maybe a bit slower after a very wet season, but it goes all the same. You can’t slow it down, and you certainly can’t appreciate every moment of it. But you can go outside and close your eyes for just a moment on the trail so that all there is is the sound of leaves crunching under foot like a child’s crinkle toy.

The novel isn’t done, but I am on the trail. I am mapping it in my head while I follow old mining roads to plot points. I am turning off game trails just to see if they end up anywhere, if a character might appear in the woods as they have many times. When my eyes are open, when I am not savoring the coos and the crunch, I am dictating notes into my phone. I’m grateful I’m doing any writing at all. Maybe one day I’ll even be nostalgic for the ease, the slowness, the fleetingness of it all. 

But I can assure myself of this: I am, at the very least, paying attention.

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Shangrilogs turned three years old while I was on maternity leave this past August. If you’ve been enjoying it, maybe a friend would too.

Jibs, appreciating how far we’ve come.