Slowing down to observe life when plans change

The late summer light is giving way to fall, like the slow turning of a dial. Everything is muted and yellow-gold. The light comes slanting gently into the kitchen at 5:00pm when I’m wrapping up my work day.

There is a calm after storms, when all goes quiet. Such is the calm I suppose I am in. Recent storms – last minute changes in travel plans, hastily rebooked flights – have meant that Raja has gone off to visit family in Jordan without me, and I’m here at home in the yellow-gold light of early fall in Massachusetts.

It’s been hard to write lately, hard to run, hard to keep on top of texts and emails, hard to do much beyond keeping going through a stressful time, which in itself takes energy. Pivoting to new travel plans seems to have zapped all my energy.

A lot of my friends are running marathons this fall. As these weeks are peak training time for fall marathon season, they are out on weekend mornings running 14, 18, 20 miles. I see them on Strava and I give them Strava kudos.

Last Tuesday I slipped out into the chilly morning air before work and ran 2.5 miles and I was happy with that. I’m not comparing myself to the marathon-running friends. Or perhaps I am in a way, but not in the self-critical way which finds my efforts to be lacking. Rather, just noticing. The way I’m looking at everything these days: hm, isn’t that interesting.

I don’t have those kinds of miles in me right now. I don’t have a lot of writing in me either; I haven’t been posting too much here. I’ve been spinning slow after spinning fast. That seems okay. I’ve been enjoying the home alone time even while missing Raja (he’ll be back in a week).

I suppose I’m in some sort of messy middle where life gets reorganized, clarified, reordered. What to do in the middle? I swim at Walden Pond. I delight in cream cheese kolaches from Breadboard Bakery, around the corner from my apartment. I buy bread and goat cheese and late summer strawberries at the Trader Joe’s in Arlington Heights. I wait. I call my sisters. They call me back. I work from home and in the evenings I go visit friends and their tiny newborn babies.

I went hiking with some girlfriends in New Hampshire over the last two days. This is where I take a break from my usual programming to do a little travelogue. (What is my usual programming? Don’t ask me, I have no idea.) They had planned a two-day hike with an overnight stay at an AMC hut in the White Mountains, and since I am not in Jordan as I was supposed to be, they invited me to join them at the last minute when someone else had to pull out.

We drove up from Boston through steady dismal rain, but by the time we got to the mountains the rain had cleared and we had incredible views from the peaks we summited. Crisp, cloudy, wide-open days with some of the trees just starting to turn yellow and orange for fall. Big puffy cartoon clouds drifted over the mountains and made all shapes of shadows on the pine-covered hills.

The hut where we stayed the night was very cozy, and reminded me of college days when friends and I used to drive up to a hiking lodge owned by my college in the White Mountains. You could stay overnight for $10 as a student and do day hikes from the lodge. Back at the lodge after a day of hiking, beers and games would last late into the night – or we’d wrap up early if we were hiking again the next morning.

The AMC hut was like that, minus the college vibes, and all of us, I think, were in bed by 8:30pm. The hut staff served us lentil soup and sourdough bread and veggie potpie and cookie bars – all delicious after a day of climbing up and down mountains – and my friends and I, though half asleep by this point, played two rounds of gin rummy after dinner before going to sleep in our bunk beds in the shared rooms.

Next morning, we were up early for breakfast and then hiking to three more summits before coming down the mountain, to the car we’d left for ourselves at the end of our 15-mile trail.

It’s been many years since I hiked with a pack so the hike was tough and my legs were screaming at me by mile two. But we passed the time with jokes and snacks and talks as we walked, and it felt good to be away from the city, away from the noise of the highway, away from everything. It was so quiet up there and the air smelled sweetly of autumn. The trail was covered in bright red and purple leaves that crunched under our hiking boots.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you may already know that I’m a devotee of all things Elizabeth Gilbert, including her Substack on the practice of writing letters to yourself from unconditional love. (I shared my own Letter From Love here.) One of her recent posts discussed thinking about the unexpected turns of life, rather than good or bad, as merely interesting. She wrote, “I have a theory that by the age of 40, everyone in the world could write a memoir called NOT EXACTLY WHAT I HAD PLANNED.”

I agree.

Inspired by Elizabeth and by my own life, I’ve lately been trying to cultivate an isn’t this interesting mentality. Not all of my carefully laid plans have come to pass. Some have. Some haven’t. I thought I would be visiting family in Jordan these past two weeks, and I wasn’t.

Looking back further, I can see evidence of this everywhere. All throughout high school I thought I would marry my high school boyfriend, and spoiler alert, I didn’t. I didn’t set out to spend seven years living overseas in my twenties, yet that is in fact what I did.

All we have is now, and now, I am here at home in the yellow-gold light of early fall in Massachusetts. You can only ever be exactly where you are. This seems obvious; why do I keep losing track of this very simple fact of life? I seem to forget and then remember over and over again.

While I’m here, anyway, I just want to be as close as possible an observer of life. Of my life, of my community’s life, of my family’s life, of the life of the bus route that passes my house, of the life of the tiny yellow bird I saw on the trail yesterday, of the life of the dying flowers on my dining room table, of the life of the first notes of a favorite song as they tiptoe out of my car’s speakers.

Some things I can change, some things I can’t. Meanwhile I can notice: the rich smell of pine, the tiny wild blueberries, the quiet in my apartment. I think this, the noticing, is the ultimate gift of spinning slow.

What have you been a close observer of lately?

---