The Journey

More Camping Stuff

     (Written between 9/24 and 9/27/07)

    This is probably going to be little bits and pieces of stuff as I come across them while I'm here.  Too small for a post of their own but stuff I don't want to forget.

    I find myself sighing a lot.  I don't know if I do that all the time and am just too distracted to notice or if I really need a lot more oxygen when I relax.  It was very pronounced the first night I was here--like every minute or two I would have this big sigh--almost like I was decompressing. 

    I'm sleeping 12-14 hours a day.  If I "only" sleep 10 or 12 hours at night I nap 2-4 hours during the day.  I didn't know how tired I was.

    I spent an entire day in the cabin--the only times I went out were to go to the bathroom--I didn't even shower.  It was amazingly restful!

    As much as I loved being alone, being quiet, being unscheduled, I find I miss people a little bit.  I think that if I could stay a week I'd actually be glad to go home.  As it is, I'm not exactly excited about it but I don't really mind, either.  I'm fine with not minding--far better than not wanting to leave.

Camping Alone

   (I went on this little trip this past week)

    I started out writing this like a travelogue.  You know, "I had planned to leave the house at about noon but..."  It was pleasant and even amusing most of the time. but that's not the important part of my camping trip.

    I'll sum up what originally took several pages to say in the following:  I discovered I hadn't been on a vacation in as long as I can remember and recalled Anne Morrow Lindberg's book _Gifts From the Sea_ (worth the read if I recall correctly) where she talked about spending one month each year in a cabin by the ocean.  She spent the time in reflection.  I yearned for that month for years and years.  Thus, when thinking about a vacation I looked for and found a lovely little (12x14 ft) cabin in a state park and rented it for four days (the most they had available at the time.  I went up on Sunday and will leave on Thursday (I'm still at the cabin as I begin this) and it's been everything I had hoped for and more.

    Not as many humorous anecdotes as those several pages but it covers the basics and spares you from the verbal equivalent to the proverbial slide show of years gone by.

    What truly applies to this blog is what I discovered about myself while in my cabin in the woods. 

    You know how people keep telling all of us to find our passion and do that one thing and be endlessly happy? (Or something like that.)  What I've discovered is that I'm a generalist rather than a specialist.  I'm 56 and have no idea what my passion is.  I was feeling rather a failure about not being able to figure out something that sounded so simple on the surface of it.  I thought for a moment I had found it when I discovered photography but while I love it and will learn a lot more about it and improve my skills and have lots of fun with it, it's not my passion.  But then I started wondering if it couldn't be that photography is my passion-of-the-moment and there will be another one along at just the right moment and when that happens perhaps photography will take a backseat to the new one. 

    I'm not sure any of that is true but I'm certain I haven't found my passion.  Perhaps I will one day but perhaps there are a lot of us out there who either don't have one or have suppressed it so far down we can't find it any more.  I'm not giving up on it, just allowing myself, giving myself permission, not to have a passion so I can join in with the popular crowd.  As always, I'll be a bit of a renegade, going a bit against the tide but still allowing my boat to head downstream (pardon the mixed mataphors).

    As you can see, none of this is very well-formed but I always find that writing like this helps me solidify my confused thoughts a bit more and so I put these writings in my Journey Journal with the assurance that I'm certainly not the first person to have arrived at this place in life and not known where to go from here.