Leave to Come Back
How running away solves my problems
This weekend I finally got out of Philly for a couple days. My boyfriend and I went to stay at his parents’ empty house in central Jersey while they were away. I have just driven both to and from central Jersey and I still cannot explain to you where exactly this area is, but it was perfect. A house with multiple full-size rooms devoid of our own things and surrounded by trees. The weather over this forty-eight hours was the fun new climate apocalypse East Coast summer: so hot it kept randomly bursting into storm. Humidity was so extreme that it cycled between almost-rain (omnidirectional) and actual-rain (vertical). Experiencing this in the city can easily feel too much like a Ridley Scott film: “Welcome to your dystopian timeline. You have been assigned the role of future-peasant.” In the woods, though, it just felt like being a human animal dropped into a seasonal habitat. The bell-jar terrarium of the gods. I got to see electric green moss glow against dark, rain-blackened wood. Above us, the drone of cicadas oscillated in a sine wave. Big Silver Apples fans. Sunlight shifted and dappled. Butterflies gamboled. We soaked in the 360-degree sensory feast, and - most importantly - absorbed the simple delight of being somewhere else.
I consider myself a seasoned veteran of the spiritual quest. I’ve read the books and looked inward and upward in search of answers to life’s bigger question marks. It’s kind of hilarious to me, then, that one of the best methods I’ve found to gain existential perspective is just…literal. Literally get your body somewhere away and then look back in order to see your life from a broader perspective. It feels like muppet logic: “Now you are near, show me far.” Yet it works phenomenally and consistently well.
I didn’t start traveling properly until after my divorce at the start of my thirties, but I quickly became committed to it, spending about two months every year in the UK, and whatever else I could swing. I discovered that when across the ocean not only can I see the wide breadth of other possible ways to live, I can look back at my usual place on the map - that red pin stuck in the city of Philadelphia - and see how easily the edges surrounding me there could expand. I always come back from a trip away with crisp clarity about changes I want to make and course corrections to implement.
When I stay in one place too long I start to burrow into it like a mole. I get paler, more nervous, and short-sighted. Flinging myself out of my hometown and onto the road lifts me out of a nest and up onto a mountain to look around and see far afield. When I feel the real size of the world I myself become expansive enough to handle more things, too. On tour in Spain in 2009 I gazed out the van windows and spotted a tiny, solitary home nestled into one stretch of the Pyrenees and something in me shifted palpably. I suddenly realized I was finally ready to give up living in the house my ex-spouse and I had built a life in and move on. I came home and started to pack. It had felt insurmountable on so many levels: the years of memories, the finality of reality. But something about the sight of that little spanish house, set in the golden brown hillside of an entirely different world, cracked open my heart to the possibility of our big lives. There are so many possible homes.
The benefits of getting away do not require a setting this cinematic, nor an epiphany so grandiose. In my itinerant life I’ve often pieced together means to survive with odd jobs like feeding and praising other peoples’ cats, and watching their houses. I enjoy it in large part for the somewhere else-ness of it. Even staying in another person’s apartment in the same town can shake up my mental maze in a helpful way, the mercurial silver ball of thought bouncing into different tracks and falling into different tunnels of inquiry. The simple challenge of figuring out how to make coffee in a new kitchen forces my brain out of its mole-burrow and above ground.
At one point on our walk in the woods this weekend we emerged from the hushed deep realm of the trees abruptly into a blazing, waving meadow. This bright yellowy-green stripe of land turned out to be one of those that are mowed into the hills to accommodate the giant, ladder-like towers holding power lines. They stand there in a vast row along their private sunlit roads with outstretched arms like oversized alien scarecrows. Perversely, I’ve always enjoyed gazing at these swaths cut into the landscape. There’s something about seeing the clearing recede off into the distance for miles, holding up physical connecting lines like the strings of a tin can telephone stretched between neighboring bedroom windows. It lets my eyes and heart stretch out off into the horizon line with them. Maybe my love is just for the magic of seeing any path that flows all the way to the point where meets the bottom of the skyline, and the knowledge that it goes off on its way far beyond what I can see. It’s a visual road to follow and it promises to take me out beyond the valley where I stand. Away, away.
It turns out that brains operate with a model of energy and memory economy. When we perform identical acts in identical places repeatedly, they don’t bother to store each instance for recall. This is why you truly *can’t* remember if you locked your door when you do it the same way every day. But new stimuli - the moss, the woodland power line highway - forces the moment to be memorable, and in these slices of existence we recall things in technicolor stereo: who, what, how. In a real sense the aggregate of memory is our lives and our very identity. I think of each thing we experience as a piece of identity currency, infinitly more valuable than money. We truly trade our way through life on story, and story’s atomic parts: the moments our minds choose to keep. New experiences make us rich. New experiences also create new neural pathways, changing our brains themselves. Richer, bigger lives emerge.
As we drove back on Sunday afternoon, we took the backroads past silos and lonesome, honor-system farm stands, weaving through the gentle hills with some fresh used cds stacked on the passenger side floor for the Hyundai’s 2009 stereo. Through brief downpour and the reward of a rainbow against a dark grey watercolor sky we rode. Raw Power blasted and I drove us around around a bend and parallel to a field full of horses. They galloped alongside us in time with the music. Beautiful. In my memory, it plays in slow motion. This singular jewel, this encapsulated moment, is now mine to keep. I picture it like a piece of crystal with a slow-motion film playing in a facet. Horses, running for pleasure on an August day. This and other such jewels are mine, and I am them. I know that they are best found out there, in the world and on the road, waiting for me to make the effort to come to them. It’s worth it.
This was a lovely read, Gillian. Glad I got to see/hear Rusalnaia and Ex Reverie live.