The Resolution of the Doing. The Evolution of the Not.
“We saw you earlier on the road. We noticed you’re traveling by bike. You must need a lot of energy,” she giggled.
“Here, this is for you.”
She came to my campsite and handed me a bar of Swiss chocolate. Milk chocolate with hazelnuts.
I was hungry and there wasn’t any food in my bag. Evening was setting. The sun was falling into the arms of the horizon as it does every evening. I’d been riding through the west coast of the south island that afternoon.
Highway six which starts north and goes all the way down south along the west. Traffic is minimal. There are hardly any people in this area. So I only have to keep an eye on the milk tankers and on the few tourists that every so often continue to drive on the other side of the road.
The population of New Zealand is 4.6 million. 1.38 million of those souls are tagged to the south island. Although a developed country, internet in the south island is not as common as espresso, cheap beer on tap, ginger and stunning landscapes. Internet or supermarkets that is.
Having no food in my bag and having no supermarkets that I could pedal to, the chocolate bar was indeed a gift.
A gift of love from a stranger. Serena from Switzerland.
Days before I was offered another gift from another stranger which seemed like no stranger at all and more like an old friend who I haven’t seen in years: Eva.
A kind soul in the body of a thirty six year old woman who left her corporate post in Germany.
I met Eva the day after I arrived in Punakaiki – (say it fast: Poon-nah-kah-key).
Eva had been traveling for almost a year. After leaving home, and before coming to New Zealand, she spent time in Switzerland and India. She should be in Hawaii now and then she will prepare for a return home in March.
“We’re so obsessed with doing and doing.”
“The other day I stopped to see this beautiful view,” she said.
“There was a man, getting out of the car, click, click, click with the camera. Then he gets back in his car.”
“So right before he left, I went to him.”
“I had to say something” she told me.
I asked her what she said.
““What are you doing!?! You’re not seeing what’s in front of you.” Then he said that he was going to look at the view by looking at this pictures later, “
“I couldn’t believe that. I just couldn’t,” she waved her arms in the air.
“We just want to do and do and do and do. And we don’t appreciate what’s in front of us because we are too busy doing,”
“When I went to India I was overwhelmed because people were telling me “you have to see this and that and this and that. You have to go here and there,” and I was anxious. So I decided I didn’t have to do any of that,”
The afternoon I met Eva, I was struggling with exactly that. The not doing enough.
I had come to a very far away place and I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t hiking. I wasn’t taking pictures. I wasn’t seeing the places that I had heard of. I was traveling by bike and I wasn’t doing all the things that people who come to New Zealand on holiday do.
I wasn’t doing. And because I wasn’t doing, this idea of coming to New Zealand on a bicycle was simply stupid.
Traveling by bicycle offers that experience which is different to what I’ve done in my prior travels: get on the bus, off the bus, drop your bag at the hostel, go do ‘fill in the blank’, eat and sleep. Repeat the next day.
Before I left the United States and unbeknownst to me, I was far too busy to even notice the anxiety contained within body.
It wasn’t until I started pedaling that I realized the stress my mind had been under.
It wasn’t until I started pedaling when that I realized the need for doing things I had.
Barely four months ago, I’d start my days at five o’clock in the morning. I’d check email and the meetings I had scheduled that day.
“Yay. I have only six meetings today and not twenty.”
Nine o’clock would make its way onto the clock and I’d look at my phone every five minutes, at my calendar every twenty to keep track of the fifteen meetings I had to attend in an eight hour work day. That didn’t account for the desk bound work that piled up. Work that many evenings, I ended up taking home. To then work some more on Saturdays at eleven at night, to work some more on Sunday afternoons from the coffee shop.
Repeat five times a week. Repeat fifty times a year.
Repeat forty times in a lifetime.
IN THE ONE AND ONLY LIFETIME.
‘How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.’
“What are we doing to ourselves?” I asked Eva.
She sighed.
“How many hours have you worked today?” I would ask the manager from this hostel I stayed in.
“I’m not counting them. I rather not,”
The next evening, I would ask her the same thing. And the next one too.
“Don’t do that to yourself,” I would advise every evening.
Stop with that bullshit Frances, you’re the one who quit your job.
Yes. That’s me.
It was a lot easier to organize an escape, to mine blast away the path of comfort and knowingness, to eradicate anything that could pull me back so I had nothing to return to when things got hard on the road, when I wanted to go back and the excuses for returning rained on me as much as it rained on highway six.
It was easier to do all of this than to figure out how to make this busy-job-thing and this living-with-depth thing work like a tandem parachute. Week after week trying to only discover that the expert in this tandem arrangement, the one who pulled on the parachute was Job and everything else, meaning Life, was strapped to Job. So when the weight on the tandem became burdensome, Job detached from Life, pulled out the parachute and watched Life fall from the skies slap landing on the ground from 15, 000 feet.
My job kept me safe, it kept me sheltered. And I got comfortable.
And because I was too comfortable I got scared.
My job kept me busy. Very busy. A busyness that became louder and louder the more time passed by. Not because I did more but because its echo shouted back at me every Sunday evening as I prepare my mind for another week.
Then Friday evenings ticked themselves onto the calendar and I was drained. Physically, mentally and emotionally wasted.
And because I was so drained, I didn’t notice how consumed I was. I didn’t have the mental and emotional output to invest into doing what I wanted. Or perhaps, what I was in need of: depth.
It was not the job I had, it wasn’t the corporation I worked for. It was my mind. It was how my brain was wired. It was me.
Life was good however. As of the last few years, I’ve worked hard in putting mechanisms and controls in place that allow me to live a life in which physical, mental, emotional and spiritual hazards are minimized. That is an eloquent way to say: I never take shit from anyone.
And because life was good, it made it even more difficult to pull the plug.
'How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.'
Those were the lines of Annie Dillard and the words that popped in my head every Saturday morning as I contemplated this life I was given and how I was living it.
Yet, the times I posed Annie Dillard’s words as a question, I wasn’t so sure I was comfortable hearing the answer.
Days were good but busy. Too busy.
I didn’t want to be shallowly busy. I needed to be deeply busy. I needed depth, not width.
I didn’t want the noise of a vain, comfortable and busy life.
So when I told my manager I was leaving, she said:
“Life isn’t a dress rehearsal. Go do what you need to.”
Life slows down when you travel by bicycle.
There are three things I have to do each day I’m on the road: 1) pedal 2) eat 3) find a place to sleep.
The other days when I’m not on the road, slowly, very slowly, I give myself permission to do what I’m not used to: nothing.
And when I do do something, I do things I wasn’t able to do three months ago.
I wake up to the songs of the birds.
I wake up and watch the sunrise from a hill or from a lake.
I slowly drink my café con leche. I can actually taste it now.
I spend countless of hours at coffee shops. I traded spreadsheets for coffee, for writing, for reading.
I hike on a Monday morning.
I run on a Tuesday late afternoon.
I take my bike on a day trip without having to wait for the weekend.
When I’m sick, I offer my body the nourishment it needs so it can heal.
Sometimes the best treatment is time and gentleness.
The days when I pedal, I have time to notice how the scent of the land changes. How the ferns seem different; how the greens are of different shades. How the moisture of the air changes.
Every day, I have time to notice other landscapes.
I have time to explore my anxieties.
I have time to sit with my fears.
I have time to learn and unlearn.
I have time to think.
I have time to feel.
I have time to create.
I have time to watch me grow.
I have time to become.
I have time to figure out who this better human is and how she is showing up in life. For herself and for others.
I have time to just be.
And I know this thing that I’m doing won’t last forever and at some point, I have to return to the world of comforts, politics, elusive securities, and do’s and do’s and do’s.
But for now, I have committed a year of my life to travel by bicycle.
Just one year of this 70 + year if I’m lucky lifetime. That’s 1.43% of my life.
I have committed a year of my life to learn how to sit still.
I have committed a year of my life to listen.
I have committed a year of my life to being away so that I can come back.
A man by the name of Terry Pratchett said:
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
Two thousand fifteen is now written as one of those four letter years: epic.
As epic as two thousand twelve and two thousand thirteen were. Those were years of unrest, exploration, discovery. Pivotal years in which expansion and growth came disguised as suffering, confusion; all of it all taking me to the place I needed – not wanted to - to be.
My two thousand fifteen was more of a year of paying attention, of mere observation. Times of allowing these fears to be and of learning how to be at ease and find joy in what's uncomfortable. It was a year when the questions were asked.
The year in which amongst all this doing, something snapped. What seems now to have fallen out of place at first, however, is now falling back into its place. This time into its proper place.
A year of ‘it is now or never’.
And over 'never', I chose 'now'.
It was the year in which this vow, this fast I committed to more than three years was broken with a special being.
A handsome man who was placed on my path and who appears to have the wisdom of understanding this complex soul and treating this heart with much love and compassion.
As the clock approached midnight, I thought about all the doers and the dreamers and the souls who take a stand for something.
As I stood in the middle of the crowd in Queenstown, New Zealand, 8,000 miles west from the place I call home, I silently toasted to this: to having the courage of asking yourself the very tough questions and when the answers seem to create pain and unrest, to find the resolve to change them.
Two thousand sixteen will be the year of the planned return. That year in which I will ask the question again:
Frances, are you spending your days in the same way you are wanting to spend your life?
Frances + Eva, Punakaiki, November 2015