Go Find a Lake

Recently, I climbed into an alpine lake. The rocks were slippery and unstable, the water near freezing. In the time it took to gasp, the cold was in my bones. I waded deeper until I found sandy bottom and crouched down, the water up to my shoulders. I breathed through it. Sat quietly. Time dilated, a subjective eternity but a ten-count at most. And then I stood and climbed out of the water and over the stones like an ungainly, wet spider and lay myself on a warm rock in the disappearing sun.

I always describe dunking myself into an alpine lake like being disassembled molecule by molecule and put back together. In reconstitution there is also realignment – the crooked angles worked out, the bones better situated in the web of ligaments and fascia, the neurons cleared of interference, a weight left in the water, not to return with me to shore.

We camped that night in our cars. We had meant to sleep by the shore of the lake, but a storm had rolled in the night before leaving a dusting of snow across the peaks. We had driven through that storm to get to the mountains. It brought us rain and double rainbows, dark clouds interspersed with warm fall sunshine. But up here, nearly two miles up, it had left snow and wind. The sun was the kind of warm you only feel at altitude with less air above you but it soon ducked behind the hills and we decided it would be too cold to sleep where we were. So we hiked down, drove to a campsite and laid out our pads and sleeping quilts in the backs of our cars with the seats laid down.

We ate together. Dehydrated food. Soups, mostly, of different kinds. Little aluminum pots balanced over cans of fuel and tiny stoves made for walking in the woods for days or months at a time. We had our headlamps around our necks or perched on our foreheads, but no one turned them on. We sat in the growing darkness and ate, not needing more civilization than the comfort of a table and a bench and warm down and fleece layers.

The moon came over the ridge with a brightness and swiftness that alarmed us. A spotlight emerging over the mountains that seemed like it couldn't be natural. Had to be a person, a truck, a building, a helicopter. But it was just the moon, nearly full, and almost blinding to look at. We had been sitting in darkness, quietly chatting and eating, but now were awestruck and silent, turned to witness a moonrise as if it didn't happen every day.

We often say it is healing to be in nature. I often say that. To be alone with your thoughts, away from wifi and cell service. To walk and be tired in your muscles rather than in your heart. To have sweat drying on your skin and dirt under your nails. To be bitten by bugs and burned by sun and chafed by wind. It's mostly unpleasant. Too hot, too cold. Instant food that always tastes a bit like the last thing you cooked in your pot. A sleeping pad and a quilt that aims for bearable rather than comfortable.

This, all this is the healing. To be uncomfortable. To feel in your body the weight of existence. To be subject to forces greater than your control and be forced to accept them because to do otherwise would mean hiking back down the mountain, packing up your camp site, admitting that you didn't belong here. You can't change the wind. You can't change the sun. The moon will rise and startle you. A twig snaps in the night. Something rustles outside your tent. This is what it is to be alive and to feel.

There's a joke. You hear it a lot these days. It has many forms but at its core it goes something like this: How am I supposed to write emails with a nervous system made to tell me if I'm being stalked by a lion?

The world is stressful. Every morning I wake and reflexively open my email to see what people need from me. What I didn't accomplish yesterday. What new terrors the world has devised for me. For people like me. For people I care about. I read about what I should buy because it's cheaper than normal or because it's new or because it'll solve some problem I didn't know I had. All of this I parse before I've even left the warmth of my bed.

I should wait to open my email. The good days, the days I get more done, are the ones where I leave my phone where it is. Drink my coffee, write out my plan for the day in my notebook (spiral bound, Memosyne A5, dot grid. Pilot Iroshizuku ink in black in a Pilot Custom 823 with a medium nib), sit in the sun for a moment under the bougainvillea in the back yard. Ritual, intention, practice. These help prepare a body to process the world as it is inevitably revealed throughout the day.

I almost never do this. The need to know what is happening, who needs my attention, what's on fire today, is simply too strong. It's too easy to reach out and pick up my phone. To disregard all the systems I've designed carefully over the years. Too easy to fall into my rss feed, to see what's happening on discord, to drop a joke into the groupchat just for the dopamine rush of making my friends laugh.

There's always more work to be done. There's never enough time for rest. There's always a lake I wish I was sleeping next to. But not so much that I don't want to be here, at my desk, doing this work. Nature is healing, but work is important. It gives me a reason to be in the world. It gives shape to my days, my weeks, my life.

This newsletter is mostly about the ways in which this job is hard. Someone I care about deeply, whose perspective has always been a touchstone, recently told me I should change the name of this project. That it's too negative. It gives the wrong idea. 

I didn't change the name, but I did listen. There's a core of that concern that resonates with me. That worries me. I don't want to give the wrong idea. To give an impression of my experience that negates the joy I find in doing what I do. I love this work and I hope I get to keep doing it for the rest of my life. Lots of agents seem to die in the chair, working until their bodies and their minds give out. I don't know that that's a bad thing. I don't know that I'd hate that happening to me.

But I had to learn the hard way that the work can't be the only thing for me. For a while it was, and I was worse. A worse friend, a worse partner, a worse collaborator. It made me less good at doing the work I cared so deeply about. I had to find new boundaries, new ways of engaging with the greater project at hand. If I let it consume me there'd be nothing left. 

So, I try to remember to go climb a mountain and dunk myself in icy waters until I can't bear it any longer. I try to remember to watch the moonrise and feel subject to a world so vast and beyond my control. I try to remember to breathe before I start my work. To take a moment to order myself before the world upends any plans I had for the day.

Publishing is hard. Writing is hard. Work is hard. That's why they call it work.

Do the things that make it so you can work as hard as you want to. Take the time so that when you are at your desk, when you're in the coffeeshop, when you're putting pen to page you can do work that matters.

And go find a lake. It'll help, I promise.