We canoed yesterday up the Rappahannock to a small tributary where we paddled up to the low-tide flats and eventually to a small swampy area near a farm. Along the way abundant osprey moved from branches to docks and back while several gulls stood their ground on pilings closer to the river. By the time we worked our way back to the Rappahannock the current had increased so that we paddled much harder to gain less distance. In fact, we stayed against the strong current all the way back toward the bay.

We didn’t take pictures; in fact, all we brought was water and peanut butter sandwiches. I didn’t even bring a phone. If we capsized or otherwise tumbled into the water, nothing would be lost. It was very freeing, and relaxing of course. We spent a good part of the morning drifting past large embankments with old houses set back.  Each has an extensive dock reaching to the channel, and some homes are so hidden by trees it was only the sun hitting the windows that made me realize a house was on the hill at all. Further along, the shrinking creek moved toward corn and soybean fields, so we turned around and worked against the rising tide. At one point a tern plummeted into the water exactly in front of us stealing away with a small croaker.

We’ve paddled along these small creeks and the wide Rap right at the mouth of the Bay for twenty years now. Sometimes we bring food and something to drink and we’ll rest on the beaches of one of the islands and have lunch then collect sea-worn oyster and scallop shells. When I was in high school we had a canoe and explored the shores of the Lynnhaven River in Virginia Beach years before development turned the area into more of a city. Back then I’d often bring a book to read and let myself drift in an inlet. Sometimes a fish would jump and slap the side of the aluminum boat. Those waters and these, about seventy-five nautical miles apart, are fantastically similar in their vistas, tides, and even their life; both are a source of oysters, crabs, and small fish. In both cases it was a short distance from the inlet to the Chesapeake, and in both cases I preferred not to bring anything along—no phones, no music, and often very little conversation.

These days, however, I’m not bringing along so much more than ever. Today we left behind the weight of negative thought from the media. I left behind the comments of politicians, the commentary of news hawks, the criticism of the swarming public. I consciously left behind fears of nuclear war and domestic terrorism.

I opted out of bringing along enrollment numbers at the college, my to-do list around the house, and any concerns I have had about food. I just pushed off and paddled back. I love the art of canoeing. The very nature of moving through the water demands I sweep the engulfing waters behind me in order to move forward. In fact, the river and bay have enough information already to occupy my continuing curiosity about time. Just a few miles to the south of nearby Stingray Point is an underwater crater near Gwynn’s Island in Mathews County where some long-ago meteor helped form the east coast. And throughout the Bay and River are reefs of shipwrecks hundreds of years old, lost during storms while exploring the wilds of these now domesticated shores. Out there we are constantly reminded of the fragility of time and the futile pursuit of hurtful, damaging, misplaced energy.

I can clear my head while out on the river. I can remind myself that nature is the best example of how if all is ever lost, one of our strongest traits is the ability to start again. It helps in times like these to know that no matter how bad things might seem, we can adjust our course, and if we tack correctly, we can even move with grace against the current problems.

This morning we saw a man at a boat slip, alone, returning his small fishing boat to the trailer behind his truck. It took him just minutes and then he was off. He hadn’t caught anything, but he waved with the pleasure of a man who had just completely let go of whatever might have weighed him down. I was never a fisherman, but right then I knew I would be good at it since catching anything is not really required. I would do as well as Thoreau, who wrote, “Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.”

I am not trying to hide; I am not paddling away from anything. I am moving into the permanence which is nature as I did forty years ago, as I hope to do for years to come. It doesn’t ridicule; it doesn’t pass judgement. It doesn’t change the rules or tease or taunt. And while it can be brutal, it is brutally honest. And when I again navigate those waters and can deliberately move through the day, I will be, like Thoreau, ready to return to civilization.

If life happened in a day, and Einstein is horrifically more accurate than we would like, then let’s make a 6 am sunrise birth and place death around a 9pm sunset. I’ve always preferred summers for the extended daylight hours.

And if we break a life of ninety years (I’m an optimist) into a day, we live about six years an hour, or a year every ten minutes. Goes fast doesn’t it? In fact, my clock reads 3:30 pm. School’s out, lunch has been made, eaten, and cleaned up, and the morning hours are so long ago I barely recall them anymore.

If life happened in a day, we’d make sure we didn’t miss much, no matter the weather or how tired we are. We’d call our closest companions and ask them to join us—we’d go through this together. It is too bad we can’t do this again, we’d admit. I don’t want to miss any of it, we’d say, suddenly aware of how fast time goes by, how many moments we let slip away. In fact, just talking about the fleeting morning might make us miss those hours of the day’s youth when discovery is ripe and exploration is new. Those hours of life when no one but us has yet discovered the forest out back, the rapids in the creek down the road, or the view from the bent branches of a birch.

Looking back at my own day, around 10 am I lived in Massachusetts in a yellow house next to a reservoir. It was a quaint village surrounded by a larger town, and across the street was a small post office and an antique store. Just up the winding road was an apple orchard where I bought bags of apples and where my neighbor the postmaster would buy me an apple pie for shoveling her driveway. I loved then, and I often talk about how I wish it was 10am again, and I again was leaving work to head to the mountain to hike to the summit to see kettles of hawks.

Just an hour later, I was gone, living in a different latitude and finding myself finding myself once again. Love was easier than it should be and shorter than I had hoped, and the lessons learned so late in the morning stole my energy for a while. Exhaustion isn’t always because of age; sometimes it is momentum. But time passes. I’d give the next six hours to have a few minutes back, but we can’t. We must look forward. If I spend too much time regretting what happened at 11 this morning I’ll blow right through the afternoon without noticing the way the light of the sun can bring everything to life.

At noon I walked to the river with my son on my shoulders, and we laughed our way through the early afternooon, hiking through woods and eventually continents. It was just about three this afternoon we trained across Siberia, and ten minutes later hiked across Spain. If my clock battery broke between three and four, I’d consider myself a lucky man.

What a day it has been so far. I can’t recall a single hour of my life I’d not do again. From sunrise on I’ve had a great time trying to stay one clip in front of the bend, with golden moments I couldn’t have scripted myself. Maybe that’s why the day seems so fast—I’m really having a great time.

Did you ever stop and just recall a moment from years ago like it had just happened, just now? I mean so that you can taste the meal and smell where you were, feel it, so real like it just happened, just now, but it didn’t. That happened to me today, over and over and over, and now it is 3:30, and it is happening again. Thank God happy hour is so close; I need a drink.

Tonight, from 6 to 9, I’m going to take my time and do the best I can.

What time is it in your world?

 

Now scientists can “edit” genes in a human embryo to prevent a disease. As a writer and a professor of writing I stand strongly behind any form of editing. It is, after all, an attempt to make something better either by adding clarity, eliminating awkwardness, or, in this case, correcting errors. It is difficult to find fault with this.

I know the arguments.

Gene manipulation of any sort can lead to “designer” babies. Sure, parents with money will be able to not only eliminate disease but order up some character traits not already fine-tuned in the sperm. Those without the means will suffer the process of natural selection and have to be satisfied with what God offered up. Further, the embryo-envy group will insist that this could lead us into dangerous territory including cloning, or possibly creating a robot-like race.

Slow down. There are regulatory speed-bumps still to overcome. In the meantime, if we can scrape the cancer out of a kid why would we not want to? And when someone suggests it really should be “God’s will” how the baby comes out, I get frustrated, pissed off, and down right angry. All of my reactions are traits that could have been removed with one more run through of gene-check when I was born. But how can anyone not become infuriated? It is God’s will that children be born with cancer? Cerebal Palsy? Cystic Fibrosis? Seriously? That’s sick. How (in God’s name) do these people not know it possibly was God’s will to enable scientists to finally have this moment, where in some lab somewhere someone sat back, looked up and stared straight ahead, blinked, and said, softly to herself, “Praise God. We did it”? Under the acutely pretentious mentality that it was “God’s will” that misfortune remain standard, we should have no medicines, eye glasses, or deodorant. You can’t have it both ways; the same God that “allows” tragedy to befall a newborn might just have balanced His intent with a scientist’s capability to solve the problem.

If some baby has a dangling modifier or comma splice, I say have at it. Eliminate the gene that bends toward polio, Chron’s, leukemia, or blindness. Clean up the embryonic paragraph which begins with an incomplete digestive system, a fragmented spine, a misspelled heart valve. And, my dear scientists, surgeons, or managing editors—however you will be so labeled—while you’re in there, quickly skim through the frontal lobe and fine-tune the common sense. See what you can do about the math scores on SATs and the gene that enables tail-gating, stealing, lying, and pain. This little move toward disease control could be a step toward babies designed to share with others, to empathize, to help the needy and to not text and drive.

I wonder, though, if personality traits can be manipulated as easily as cancer control. If so, can we finally make a move toward understanding and compassion? Is it possible that this discovery is the end to the common trend toward gluttony and greed? These designer babies might, by design, be intolerant of hunger, might make it a crime to be homeless because of some doctor who checked the fetus galley sheets and noticed a gene which still allowed unnecessary suffering and had the presence of mind to grab a bottle of amniotic white-out.

In a world where so many have no issue with the swerve toward technology and computers that think ahead, robots with limbs not unlike our own, what is so wrong with a step toward humanity? Instead of improving machines to help us make life more convenient and comfortable, how about making the technology obsolete by improving the people?

How much embryonic manipulation will it take before hunger is no longer an issue? How many edits is it before the desire for war doesn’t even enter someone’s mind?

People must stop being suspicious of science and finally understand that the human race is dying; we are on a slow decline and have become more accustomed to crude comments than constructive conversation, indifferent toward arms buildup and troop movement, and infinitely more blasé about hope, possibility, and peace. When did we decide that disease and suffering were simply part of humanity and will never change?

Still not convinced that gene-manipulation might be worth investigating further just to understand the possibilities? Than ask yourself this: If you knew your child was going to be born with a painful disease or perhaps die at ten-years-old from cancer, and you could stop it from happening, would you?

I spent a short time today talking to a woman who was born in 1912. This 105-year-old lady was born almost fifty years before me. It made my day and I can’t stop thinking about the brief encounter, and one nurse said it made the old woman’s day because no one stops to talk. No one stops to talk!? I thought. That’s insane, but the truth is people are too busy to stop and sit quietly with a stranger. Me too; I just happened to be there with time to kill, and I became painfully aware of how important a few minutes can be. Lesson learned.

But driving away I thought about how the small things in life matter most; or annoy us most. In both cases, the big events are anticipated, planned for, and dealt with, whether the event is a birth, death, marriage, divorce, hiring or firing—we adjust. But the small stuff can kick us in the teeth or kick us in the ass.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (PS. It’s all Small Stuff) is one of the most successful books ever. But I disagree with the sentiment. Honestly, the small stuff is all that matters. The small stuff is the difference between service and “good” service; between a good day and a great day; a relationship and true love; on and on and on, it’s always the small stuff that makes the difference.

When people say “thank you” instead of nothing, or when they say “Can I help you?” instead of staring at you when you walk to the counter, they turn a brief experience into something unmemorable and forgetful instead of a bad experience. When you let someone cut in front of you in traffic and the other person waves “thank you,” it feels good and you’re more likely to do it again, or at the very least satisfied you did it that time. I don’t believe we should be looking for a thank you every time we do a favor, but it sure makes a difference. It feels good. And it is polite.

I can afford to buy food but the free samples at Sam’s Club are fun to graze. When I rent a hotel room I just need a place to stay, but thicker towels or a strong shower head make me stay there again. Small stuff. Free oil changes when I buy a car is most likely written into the price I paid to begin with, but not having to worry about laying down fifty bucks every three thousand miles is a nice touch. If I get to save five cents a bag by bringing my own bags to the grocery store, I want my twenty cents, dammit; I don’t care how much I just saved on Breyers.

Many people can do a job, but the one who gets raises and promotions is the one who goes beyond, and it might be in small ways—the extra thirty minutes early or late, the working with individuals, the overtime. In college classrooms 4.0 GPAs are pretty common, so the recommendation goes to the student who volunteered on weekends, joined the club, or tutored the weaker students.

When I was born this lady was forty-eight years old; not that much younger than I am now and I’ve lived a lot of lives myself. She was wheeling herself down a hallway by pulling herself by her feet. I was leaning against a wall and she paused in front of me and I said “Hello.” Her reply of “Well Hello!” was weak and less powerful for her lack of teeth and breath, but she was absolutely coherent. She wore yellow pants and the way she pulled herself showed ambition. When she was born the Republic of China was founded and flight was only invented nine years earlier. 1912 was the year George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion, Dale Carnegie taught his first course in public speaking at NYU, and the Titanic sank. I thought about all that has happened in the more than a century since she was a toddler, and her head dropped backwards and she said, “I like flowers.”

Flowers. At the end of the day, she’s thinking about flowers.

Forget the big stuff—the house, the swimming pool, the convertibles, and the New Year’s Eve parties—it’s the laughter, the looking in the eyes when talking, buying her roses, making breakfast.

It’s Scotch on Tuesday nights, early morning talks about the news, taking sunset pictures at the river, putting on just the right shirt, fresh sheets, a walk. The small things make us laugh, or cry, give us hope or goose bumps.

I don’t think the forthcoming solar eclipse has made many people contemplate the power of the universe, but mention that right-handed people live on average nine years longer than left-handed people and everyone bolts for a search engine. It is the small stuff. It is the human contact, it is the personal touch. Saying “I Love You” is infinitely more common than taking the time to find the small gift that only you would know she’d like.

The short time I take in the morning to stop at the ocean and watch the sunrise stays with me all day. When I move closer to this woman’s age, decades from now, I want to remember those moments at the water, or picking tomatoes from my garden, or watching birds at the feeder. I want to recall the sound of my son’s harmonica when we travel, my father’s deep voice, my mother’s laugh, the incoming tide.

My ambition is simplicity, and my hope is that after a century of gives and takes, failures and fortunes, my final thoughts are about flowers.

I had a third grade teacher on Long Island who hated boys. This was not a secret; even my mother used to complain that the woman, whose name I long ago blocked out, despised boys. She would make us sit in the corner but never the girls, would never call on us if we apparently knew the answer but always would if we apparently did not.

And I remember once she said that boys who play outside are very susceptible to spider bites and that might be dangerous since it isn’t unusual for a spider to lay eggs inside you. In fact, she said, she knew of someone who had been bitten in the cheek by a spider, and it started to itch not long after the bite. It became uncontrollable until he ripped open the bite scar with his nails and hundreds of baby spiders crawled out and down his cheek and neck, but some had already crawled into his brain and he died not long later.

We were eight years old.

This can’t be true, I remember thinking. We live in New York, not Panama. The following summer my family moved further east on the Island into a new house in a small village surrounded by an arboretum, a state park, and the Great South Bay. There were bound to be spiders. Still, I spent most of my time during those years hiking through woods, climbing trees, walking forbidden trails to mysterious creeks, and building forts in the trees behind our house. In fact, I’ve spent the better part of my life outside in nature, and I don’t think I ever had a single spider bite, let alone a colony inside my face.

But the story stuck. The following year at a new elementary school, I had better teachers who told us we could grow up to be anything we wanted, and nothing at all could stop us; absolutely nothing. Mark was going to be a musician and Norman was going to be a great athlete. I was going to play baseball. Unfortunately, I sucked. But no matter what happened, I always felt lucky. And I wasn’t afraid of spiders anyway; I just didn’t want them building canals through my dental work.

Who does this? Who so instills fear into others as to mark them for years, decades, to come? Nowadays, everyone. When I mention to my students that in my youth it was simply expected that we’d at the very least treat each other with respect, they laugh. They tell me in no uncertain terms that they believe they are entitled to treat each other how they see fit, and the funnier the disparaging comment, the more popular the person.

They call me old. Go figure. Students don’t have much hope in their future. Faculty doesn’t have much hope in students. The media doesn’t have much hope for our country. It goes on. And all of them attempt to outdo each other in securing the best sound bite to ridicule others. There are some days I long for a good arachnid attack. Still, I am an acute optimist.

I miss the time when people who didn’t agree were still somewhat respectful of each other. Such mutual acknowledgement of separate ideas would never be found on the playing field. It would be at the very least un-sportsmanlike conduct.

We make fun of each other too much. We ridicule what we don’t understand or agree with. We insult what we are threatened by. We manipulate what we need to win. We ignore our weaknesses and pay too close attention to those of others without stopping to say what we admire in others. We should change that approach. It isn’t working out.

Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going to be from day to day, night to night. I have been thinking these past few weeks about that exhilarating sense of waking up knowing you’re going to wander a bit and not deciding what happens next until you stumble upon it. A few years ago I lived this way in July and August every single day and night in Spain, and will do it again next year. Everyone should live this way at least once. Really.

One evening, Michael and I spent the night above a bar in Samos, Spain, and had pulpo–octopus–for dinner. Later that night a priest invited us to a private party and we stood next to four buffet tables of pinchos and wine, and we ate and stood on the balcony drinking wine and watched swans swim by in the lake behind the cloister hissing at the setting sun. Every single day outdid the previous one. I kept waiting for that golden moment, and they kept coming. Like that following morning when we walked to a nearby field and found a chapel from the 9th century alone in the mist, and some eternal sacred silence.

We slept on yoga mats in a hallway of an old church in Logrono, Spain, with seventy other tired souls after we shared dinner and walked through the basement of the five hundred year old building. For two nights we slept in comfort in the same hotel Hemingway stayed while working on The Sun Also Rises. In some small, old chicken village we stayed in a brand new albergue, which had no business being open yet. The floors and ceilings weren’t done, it was freezing inside, and the yet-to-be-inspected bathroom was three floors down. The only bar in town was closed so the owner gave us a few beers which made up for the thick dust everywhere. We stayed near Torres del Rio above a bar with fine food and a wading pool out back to soak our blistered and　swollen feet. We stayed in an old monastery a hundred yards from a church St Francis of Assisi himself asked to be built. In Portomarin we stayed up as long as we could　because the rooms were all filled. We hung out in a small café until 1am and then walked around the misty, cooling waterfront. Then we settled on the town square with covered walkways running next to a medieval church. Against some storefront we pulled together folding chairs and wrapped ourselves in whatever we could and tried to sleep in rapidly dropping temperatures. A kid on a bike did tricks on the steps of the church until 3 am which anyway kept me amused. At 4:30 we got out our flashlights and headed west. You can see a million stars in Spain at 4:30 in the morning, and the darkness makes the silence almost visible.

In O’Cebreiro there was no room and we nearly walked out of town to camp when a man waved us toward a back door at an inn and we ended up with a beautiful private room for practically nothing at all and just outside the door were a few tables on a stone patio overlooking valleys that stretched across Galicia. In the morning the fog sat below us in those valleys, and the sun came up like we were looking at the ocean until the clouds dissolved and the sky turned blue and the green hills welcomed us.

When we first crossed the Pyrenees into Spain’s small village of Roncesvalles, we stayed　next to a chapel Charlemagne used and at night we went to the basement and spent hours drinking gin and tonics and talking to the innkeeper. In the village of Zubiri in Navarra, just before Pamplona, we stayed in a new place on the fourth floor and shard a room with a couple from France. We were all quiet that night. My son took pictures from the Roman Bridge outside our window. A few days later on the eve of the feast of Saint James, patron of this pilgrimage, we stayed in a small inn run by a single mom who made dinner for us, a woman from Madrid, and two men from Germany.　We shared a delicious Italian meal and drank clay pitchers of red wine and talked about the distances. We laughed in three languages and despite someone snoring most of the night we slept well enough to leave an hour after everyone else making our journey quieter and more perfect. We didn’t worry about how far we walked or where we might stay. We walked and we would find a place. Like the fly-infested villa with tremendous views, or the albergue with dogs who insisted on sleeping on our laps, or the room above the garage with a killer bar at the street; or the stone building down some slope where we met some girl from Texas and　a father and son from Amsterdam. After paying at the restaurant we drank the best hard cider in Spain.

In one neighborhood as close to suburbia as we ever saw, some couple opened an albergue in their house and we got the first two of five beds, the others occupied by a salesman from Madrid, a woman from Barcelona and another from Mayorca. We all had dinner on the back porch where all the flies in Spain gathered to join us, as well as a dog named Bruno, and the sun was brilliant and we slept well. Once, we stumbled into some tiny town, another chicken village, looked like a movie set for an old western, and we slept in the bunk room with fifty other people. In the morning we picked up a few supplies at their shed they called a store, but man oh man the lemon chicken was awesome.

Everything we did was deliberate.

Everything we ate was delicious

Everyone we met enriched our lives. It should be this way all the time. At home. Anywhere. We live in a phenomenal world for a disturbingly short period of time. It should always be this way.

Every single day for more than a month, and when we came home we slid quietly into the old routine, stumbled back upon a world where what was and what might be constantly drown out what is, where few live in the present, where few talk to each other. Where people stand around hissing at the setting sun, passing through life quietly, hoping before they pass away that they can raise their voices and just once join in one last swan song.

It’s Fourth of July week and I’m about to get older, and I’m in a café on the Bay thinking how I’d love for this place to be open at night, late, like 4am, and sit and have beers or wine and talk to strangers about where they’ve been, literally and figuratively. It kind of reminds me of a place I used to go to that burned down.

We called it The Shack because it had no name.

This happened about twenty years ago.

Just off the Gulf of Finland not far from an exclusive hotel but well in the woods was one of this world’s coolest bars—a dive really—a place to drink and sing and meet people you’d never want mad at you. It was small, with broken-down shed-like walls and windows which barely kept out the storm blowing off the Baltic one May night in the nineties. It was well after midnight and we ordered a bottle of Georgian Merlot and several plates of shashleek, a Russian shish kabob dish. A gypsy band showed up, including a guitar and violin player I’d met before along with a friend of theirs, a woman singer. Hours passed as we sang and drank. There were four of us, three of them, a waitress, the owner and his cat, and we sang and drank while what must have been that hurricane from The Perfect Storm slammed to shore. This duck blind of a building sat amongst birch trees, but that simply made me more aware of the weather, wondering when one might topple through the roof. It was exhilarating, an adrenaline rush that had nothing to do with the wine. It was being alive, right then at 3 am, with total strangers, live gypsy music, Georgian wine, and shashleek, that kept us awake. It felt dangerous, subversive, but it was just a bar in the woods.

The band took a break and came to our table and we spoke in broken Russian and English about the storm and how we hoped it wasn’t high tide soon since the water was just a few hundred feet west, maybe less. Then Alexi, a two hundred eighty pound drunk Russian who hated Americans started screaming at us like he had the first time I ever met him, the first time I walked in the place a few years earlier. He had kept to himself mostly since then, sometimes talking to me, mostly not, but this night something got under his skin and he screamed at me like he did that first time, “I hate Fucking Americans.” He startled me, but he had a drink in front of him, and another regular customer, a friend of the gypsy band, was sitting with him and told him to quiet down so he did.

But then I saw his eyes. They were deep and vacant, like he’d seen a ghost, and when he saw me watching him he stood up and said, “I hate fucking Americans!” and he tossed his beer at me. Sasha, the guitar player, stood up and yelled at him in Russian. But just then thunder, with a sound like the sky opening up and dropping two tons of hard earth on our shack, rattled the walls and ceiling and we all cringed. I thought for sure one of the birch trees cracked and was going to kill us all. I went down on the floor with my friends and the gypsy band, and Alexi cursed and fell against the back of his chair. He suddenly looked so small, and the thunderclap crashed on us again, this time blowing open one of the windows, and rain and wind sheered a path across our booth and against the other wall. Dima put his violin under his coat and our shasleek flew off the table onto the floor. The shack cat went for it but the wind and rain chased him back under the bar and into his bed.

Another flash of light lit up the shack and Alexi was trying to hide under his table but he was too big, and just as he glanced out the window on his way to the floor, he stopped and stared. I was watching him, and he looked out the window for some time, then looked at me, and with a nod he said, “Horosho. Horosho” which means, “okay. It’s okay.” And he looked out the window again when the window slammed back and forth. He grabbed it before it hit him and he held it a second, staring out over the Gulf. He looked at me as if to ask me to come see but he didn’t know how. Instead he closed the window and latched it again and turned and sat down. He nodded to me, “Horosho. Edeesuda.” It’s okay, come here. A few of us gathered and sat at his table, and Dima took out his violin. Alexi smiled at me, looked out the window and peered with a stoic face, then turned and smiled again. He looked at the waitress and said “pivo,” beer, and he motioned to us all so she brought us all beer. The rest of the night we laughed and sang songs. I asked Alexi what he saw outside but he just nodded at me and said, “I hate fucking Americans,” and we laughed and toasted and Dima played, then Sasha joined in and then the woman singer, and the beer tasted good. Alexi sat quietly the rest of the night.

The storm passed and the sky quieted down. I almost had stayed at the hotel that evening, turned in early, read in bed. Those are all good things, quiet ambitions which keep me grounded and invested in whatever happens next. But that night I didn’t. Like the time a friend of mine and I went Ghost Hunting at midnight at the Saint Augustine Lighthouse, or when my son and I sat up all night in the town square of Portomarin, Spain, because we couldn’t find a place to stay. One time a friend of mine and I hitchhiked to Niagara Falls and it took no longer than it would have to drive, but coming back wasn’t so lucky; we walked for eight hours along dark roads through small towns. But if we had been given a ride right away, I’m not so sure I’d remember we even made the trip to begin with.

Sometimes you have to stay up until dawn to understand what’s hiding behind the night. It’s the rest stop at three am with two truckers and a couple of local high school kids farting around; or the sound of wildlife in the desert brush, or tall pines scraping together in winter in the woods with no light but the moon. It’s walking up an Arctic Path at four am in snow-deep March with Northern Lights bouncing past like a bull whip; or lying on my back on a cot in a compound in Africa beneath more stars than could possibly exist, the distant sound of someone chanting the Koran. It’s walking out of a shack in the woods after a storm passed, the sun just lifting over the raised bridges, ears buzzing from loud live music.

On that night, we stood for a second in the quiet morning light, the four of us, and we watched the sun rise over St Petersburg, then we walked home.

I would like a quiet day. One. One quiet day without the residue of yesterday or headwinds of tomorrow. Just the day, one. A quiet one during which I could just let the river run past and feel the cool and heat of the sand and the sounds of gulls or osprey and, of course, waves; when I define quiet I include birds and waves.

I would like one of those days where I’m not waiting for a loan rejection or essay rejection to filter back, or when I’m not anticipating appointments or deadlines. A day where the phone doesn’t ring and no one knocks except family, ready with a joke or an old story to get us all laughing and remembering and planning. Usually quiet days include laughter and stories.

A day to myself like I used to do when I drove into Manhattan and walked from Herald Square all the way up and through part of the park, talking to the vendors or checking out the music along the way coming from the cafes and radios. When I explain “quiet day” I must include the sounds of the city as natural and organic as the osprey and waves since they are expected. Plus, they aren’t talking to me as much as for me so no response is expected or necessary, just my presence. Family is like that too.

My life is not unlike Thoreau’s in that my retreat is near the water in the woods where I am able to regroup, not to ignore civilization as much as be better prepared to face it. So I would like one day. One. One quiet day where I could live deliberately and be in absolute touch with the passing of time solely for the sake of the passing of time, to watch the seconds, to count the minutes. I could lean against a tree and hear the combine on the neighbor’s farm or the rigging on the boats on the river. There is a thin, very thin, line between quiet and the sound of rigging in the early morning hours.

I was thinking the other day about the quiet days in college when a bunch of us would walk into town just to get something to drink and everyone would be talking at once, and laughing at once at different things, and we were always like that and we were always going to be like that. If my mind wandered at all it was to exaggerate, to magnify, the sweet and passive activity of such permanent transience. If I am going to define “quiet days” I can’t leave off my friends. Or a drink or two.

I have had many days which I would “formally” call quiet by the Oxford definition. In Spain, at home on the river when it is early, or late. When I was young and hiked through Heckscher State Park. Sometimes when I am alone at home I fiddle around the house, working out on the property or on the porch, and can go from sunrise to sunset without a sound and it can be deafening. But those are literal, and I have come to understand that true peace is not the absence of noise but rather the presence of love.

I remember a beautiful, perfect, quiet evening a long time ago when a friend of mine and I went to an Italian restaurant in a run-down strip mall, and they were almost closed but they let us order some bread and a bottle of wine and we talked for hours, joking with the woman who worked there but mostly just laughing together about now and about thirty years ago. We finished each other’s sentences and the wine and then went our own ways quietly, content at such perfect time, but not really because it isn’t always that way, is it? No, it isn’t, though it should be.

I would like a quiet day like that again.

I know someone who can turn the most insignificant happy-thought into the most stroke-worthy bitch-session. If I say, “Hey check out the size of this Big Gulp of iced tea from 7-11. Eighty-nine cents.” I hear, “I HATE 7-11. What a dirty waste of people’s time going there. It is pathetic those places exist and they are filled with GMO food that is killing everyone anyway, AND you’re better off making icedtea at homeornot even having it becausethetea candehydrateyouandyoulljustendupneedingwaterandblahblahblah hmmmmmmmpukepuke….” And on it goes. What is the value in that? Where is the benefit in being around that?

Maybe I’m simply around too many people. By that I should say I am around too many people aware I’m around. When I travel, the crowds don’t bother me because then I’m no one, just another face on the street. But in my life here in the hallways of the college or other places where someone mistakes an innocent comment as an invitation to yet-again-bitch, everyone seems to have something to say to me. And more often lately it is negative.

The concept “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” which I grew up with, is gone. On the news, in the classroom, and even in seemingly innocent conversations about a frigging Big Gulp. Please.

So I’m on a mission to dial back the news to a need-to-know-only basis. Even—especially—the news on the television and internet and radio. It is essential to be well informed, but it is equally essential to be able to separate the news from the noise. My stress level has adjusted up during the last four months to some higher level of anxiety not at all compensated for by valuable information. Material gathered should be worth the anguish to obtain it. But that simply isn’t the case any longer. Now it is just static which causes stress, which doesn’t benefit me at all.

Excuse me while I step aside. It won’t bother anybody if I simply duck away for awhile. I can no longer handle the endless stream of garbage reported in media. Don’t pay any mind to me if I move out of the way while the convoy of criticism and manipulation passes . I’ll just sit and watch the water and wildlife do their thing, the perpetual movement of the tide. In fact, my health, my energy, and my stress level are all improved by the absence of the nightly news, which I once revered. And I’m better off without the one on one conversations with way too many negative people. I am more likely to live longer, less likely to have a negative disposition, and infinitely more likely to relax by turning away from the those discussions. No contest.

When I’m at the river and the sun is just changing tones behind clouds in the west, it doesn’t make a bit of difference who the president is, what the commentators had to say, which tweets came from which attention-deficit minds, and what happens next. My phone alert from the NY Times Breaking News doesn’t really catch my attention anymore, and I am far less interested in who said what than I am in keeping my blood pressure in double digits and my heart rate closer to my age than my golf score.

When the eagle glides from the tree tops, and the osprey teach their young to fly, and the clouds at dusk separate colors in prism-like perfection, it is hard to remember what the complaining was all about anyway. We carry our baggage way longer than we ever need to, if we ever really needed to at all. And the answers we seek in day to day life won’t be unearthed during some pointless pursuit of fair and balanced. Even if I listened more intently to all the facts and expert opinions and came to the correct conclusions agreed upon by Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, what then? So I might know the truth about A and the lies told by B and the injustice we see served to those in need. Again, what then?

I think my students would be better served if instead of watching presidential debates and finding the fallacies, we all spent some time in soup kitchens and the cancer ward at a children’s hospital and then came back and discussed respect and morality and fair and balanced. Maybe we could spend a class talking about the good there is.

When I returned from Spain I was on a mission to “simplify” my life. It didn’t take long on the Camino to discover how little I needed; how superfluous most concerns really turned out to be. As a professor of critical thinking courses I found it necessary, pre-trip, to discuss current events and breaking news. But afterwards I found philosophical discussions as relevant as any subject covered by some mass-com major graduate reporting from The Hill. I told my students that any fool can gather and argue immigration or trade; but it took real thought to discuss the “matter” of things, the bend of time. Which works better for you? I asked. “Ted Cruz said that we need to make decisions based upon faith” or “St Bernard said, “We need to learn to make excuses for other people.”  One is a proclamation of how he intends to govern; the other is an edict of how we should live our lives. This lead to discussions of driving and working, and we talked about getting along with relatives and partners. People like tangible applications. Those conversations spilled from the class to the hallway. That’s how it should be.

But time got away from me and Trump was elected and news became Reality Television and Reality Television became scripted and civil rights I thought were fought for when I was four were again issues and I just want to run away.

So I am.

When all I hear is the call of an osprey or the way the waves lap at the edge of the land, I could be in so many other places and so many other times. It is innocent, even ignorant some might say. And in a world where even a lesser-able phone than the primitive one I own can keep me up to date on news, attacks, rumors, memes, messages, appointments, and more, I’m turning off my data.

We live in the age of information, the age of blame, the age of instantaneous and simultaneous where the comment you posted ten minutes ago is now ancient news five screens in the past. It is the age of convenience and the age of emotion and the age of attention-getting-self-indulgent-everyone’s opinion matters and is valid and is equal and should be heard. And that’s just not true, it is wrong, it is defeatist, and it is destructive.

So I’m done jumping through hoops and trying to walk across coals in the classroom or other more personal conversations. I’ve finally “come ‘round right” and am simplifying my life. My theory is this: I will be healthier, happier, more efficient, more useful and focused, and infinitely more at peace.

I love the way the water feels cool on the soles of my feet on a hot afternoon, or how the salt water gets on my lips and seems to stay there all day, even after I shower. It is as if the movement of the waves exactly coincides with the movement of my blood, and that rhythm somehow settles my soul.

And it really was this simple: I just decided to. I’m going to sip my iced tea and let the river run by for awhile.

 

 

 

(with thanks to Jesse Winchester for the inspiration)

This morning I had breakfast on the pier probing out over the Atlantic in Virginia Beach. Ocean Eddies had long been an evening haunt, and despite that they’re slated for destruction, they remain open and now offer breakfast. This morning I had an omelet stuffed with scallops, crabmeat, shrimp and cheese, with toast and home fries. The sun skipped off the silvery, glass waves and the breezes kept the humidity at bay.

I was alone. It is still too early in the season—especially on a Thursday—for crowds, and I sat under an awning watching dolphins and pelicans work their way down the coast. I knew they’d reach the jetty at first street and circle back. They always do.

The pier is probably twenty feet off the sand offering more of a crow’s nest view of the horizon than a body-surfer’s vantage. And as quiet as the water was, I drifted off into the distance, circumnavigating the globe in my mind as I have for decades. This morning though I really sat and stared not so much at the water as the distance. Portugal is out there, Spain beyond. I looked just below the sun toward what I knew was the northwest coast of Galacia and pictured the people there right then, right at that moment, staring west across the Atlantic from Fisterra, where Michael and I stood just a few years ago. It never ceases to freak me out that right over the curve of the earth, just time away, are villages still, with small cafes where pilgrims right now rest, as we did. If I had better eyesight and the ability to bend vision, I could be looking right at them. I was looking right at them except for the physics of it all.

And further south is West Africa, where I had ceeb—a rice dish—for the first time and talked to friends over Flagg Beer several decades ago. It is so easy to fall into the trap of remembering the “time” it was instead of the “place” it is. I’m sure some of my favorite spots have changed while others, like the tiny chicken villages of northern Spain, are the same as they always have been. But all of them are still right there nonetheless.  It is profoundly easy to forget that when perception forces us into believing that things close by are larger and more significant than things far away. Often it is just that life blocks our view.

What a ride it has been on this spinning playground. I’ve been blessed to be able to see so much, and not by moving mountains or praying for miracles. I just decided to go. It is easy to forget that in the end the difference between when you dream about something and when you pursue that dream is a split second separated by the notion of simply deciding to do it.

These days the news has lost control and the information barrage is saturating existence; but on the pier this morning I remembered how fragile and fleeting our time is that we waste so much of it tangled up in the goings and comings of the small tentacles of anger and negativity. For example, while drinking orange juice I looked just to the north, across the other side of the bar about four thousand miles toward Norway, where early every morning our neighbor, the fisherman Magnus, came back with a cod, cut out the liver for himself, and gave us the rest. On the other side of the fjord outside the kitchen window of our cabin was nothing for thousands of miles to the north pole. I glanced that way this morning. The small town near is a fishing village, and the air is absolute. “Pure” doesn’t describe it.

I sat and looked toward the piers on Long Island, the docks on Martha’s Vineyard, the rivers and bays of New York. Sometimes I get tired and and give in to the shadows, but then I stumble upon a morning like this and I have no trouble buying into Emmanuel Kant’s insistence that “what’s next” is entirely up to us.

Have you ever sat quietly on a balcony and gazed out on the ocean? Two ideas emerge. First, it pushes part of us toward the possibilities which on a daily basis we are afraid to say out loud, and nearly simultaneously forces the lesser angels off of our shoulders, where we sweep them away with the ridiculous minutia we pretend we need on a daily basis.

Sometimes it seems as if society (allow me one paragraph of philosophical banter) is trying hard to crawl back into the cave. So many people in these days of political uncertainty and cultural dehydration seem to be staring at shadows again, looking away from the flames, obsessed with the flickering of residual data on the walls. The tragedy is the fire will burn out and the shadows are an illusion. The only course of action is to get out of the cave, see what’s out there, but too often we stand in the doorway, hesitant, terrified by terrorism and insecure about disconnection, scared we might miss something.

She refilled my coffee two times. The sun moved above a cloudbank and warmed the pier and the sand, and tourist kids from further north gathered along the waterline. I haven’t been that quiet in a long time. Sometimes at night, but never at that hour of the morning. I thought first about how at night my son and I love to get out the telescope and quietly gaze at the stars. (Warning: Trite writing ahead) The night sky stars make us feel small; they make the passing of time and the love of the people around us so much more important, and I wonder why, every single time we do this I wonder why everyone isn’t out looking at Cassiopeia or Orion’s belt. And then this morning I watched the silvery reflection on the waves and then glanced up at the sun, our very own star, no telescope necessary, and remembered all the times I watched the sunrise or set at various places fore and aft, from Arizona to the Sea of Japan.

It feels good to stop and remind myself sometimes that I couldn’t find my way back to the cave if I tried.