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Do you have a personal off-season? Can you?

My life here is supported by a resort town. There’s not a single amenity in our “town”, so we head into the actual town 25 minutes away for restaurants, stores, salons, etc. Those businesses all operate on a resort schedule, which is the closest American Industry gets to European. Beginning in late October through early December, hours are reduced and many places close up for a well-earned off-season. And I love every moment of minor inconvenience. Good for you, Siam Thai. Get out of here! No problem, ski shop. You go climb those mountains.

Unfortunately my own sanctioned off-season this time of year probably looks like yours: here are two days off — we know you’re likely spending them negotiating familial relationships, walking on Covid eggshells, trying to recover from years of getting hammered by 40-hr-work-weeks that are actually boundary-less tethers to tiny dinny nightmare sounds coming from your tracking device, all while cooking an actual feast you haven’t practiced in a year — but we hope you come back refreshed on Monday because Carl scheduled that 8am. (Carl thinks we should be back in the office because he’s a sycophant who believes the American Dream is real. Carl doesn’t give a shit what timezone you’re in.)

Corporate jobs don’t have off-seasons. And no, vacation days don’t count, because the point of shutting down the whole business is that there’s not 738 emails waiting to destroy your newly replenished zen when you get back. Which is why I believe in manufacturing your own off-seasons: breaks from fitness, upping the frequency of takeout meals, a pre-determined month of caring less when the house is a mess, a couple weeks’ work of “phoning it in” which I love and have loved since college when I realized it was possible to give a C performance and still get A- life results. And to be clear, despite years of professional work promoting it, I’m not talking about self-care. I am instead talking about self-reallocation-of-care. For me, the perfect off-season isn’t punctuated by massages and elaborate tea routines, it’s just doing a whole lot less of the bullshit and a whole lot more of the best shit.

But what is the best shit?

I have to give my brain a long enough break from the day-to-day to even figure out what a fulfilling day even is. A natural place to start here is to just think about what you’re grateful for. But when I’ve attempted gratitude journals in the past, it gets a little old writing “my legs, Finn, Ben, parents, the outdoors” over and over again. So instead, I like to think about what I regret. After all, when we sit around talking about what we’re grateful for, we’re just dancing around what we regret, or more often, what we’re attempting to not regret, e.g., ignoring your children, spending your life at a desk, never seeing Paris or whatever. Gratitude is a nostalgia-laced reverence, a practice of really nesting in the good things brought into our lives, where regret is that same nostalgia-driven awe, just this time with a big ole complicated layer of “whoops.”

I only have one serious regret — the rest all fall under the categories of “learning experiences” and “well what are ya gonna do.” (I guess the third category is “yes, I absolutely wouldn’t have gone to that restaurant that night” but that’s rewriting history — not choosing a better decision.) My biggest regret is when I had something really good and I let another person convince me it wasn’t. Or, in more explicit terms, I had a popular Tumblr from 2010-2013 that was optioned into a book and instead of converting that audience to a newsletter or different platform and continuing to write for myself, I just let it die because my Worst Boyfriend™ convinced me it (and I) were trash.

I used to resent him for that, but it was my choice. There will always be people who want to influence your decisions — usually not with any malice. But an off-season, a time when I let my brain get a full dose of introspection, allows me to pay closer attention to what’s bringing me real joy and flow immersion. When I can pay attention like this, and burrow into that feeling, I’m not so easily led astray in the woods.

Sort of like moving to this town in the first place.

“Isn’t that kind of far from a hospital?” “Aren’t you worried about avalanches?” “Do you even have snow tires?”

I had conviction around this decision. (To be fair, I also didn’t have any manipulative sacs of bitterness in my circle anymore.) Which brings me to the present, an off-season if I ever had one. Living somewhere without endless city entertainments, my job in transition with our budget slashed, friends to see in person at a near all-time low, and only six hours of actual sunshine — there’s not a lot to do but dedicate myself to figuring out what I want to do with myself.

At the tail-end of my last off-season, I and three other women set out to read Designing Your Life together. I was swimming with big ideas and bigger dreams, and I needed to shape the clay of them into something I could use, which is exactly what that book advertised it could help with. For the most part, I really enjoyed that book, but one exercise struck me as particularly futile. It asked for you to write down a thing you love, e.g., “the outdoors” or “making to-do lists”, and then make a word web in all directions under a time limit, and at the end, circle the words you wanted to be a bigger part of your life. I remember thinking this was so dumb. Then earlier this week, I came across all these old papers while unpacking. Here are the words I circled:

Home decor

Sharing

Community

Inspiration

Tropical

Rustic

Connection

Stories

Newsletter

*Gestures around at exactly what I’m doing right now, in a house I themed #tropicabin, sharing my stories and building a little community of people who care via a newsletter.*

Which brings me back to my big regret: abandoning the blog I worked tremendously hard to build. I knew when I was working on that blog that I was fulfilled. Is it ironic to do years of on-and-off soul-searching to come to the same conclusion that you did years ago? This is the plot of countless successful movies, after all. It took me a few years, and a couple very good off-seasons, but here I am, spinning my regret back in the gratitude direction.

So I want to say thank you for supporting this writing endeavor. I don’t wake up each day excited to log in to work, but I do wake up excited to work on this. And I still get questions that make me doubt myself.

“Are you doing it to just practice your writing?” “Do people actually read it?” “It seems a little aimless?”

But thanks to the right kind of rest, my conviction is happy to answer: no, yes, so?

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We have to give ourselves off-seasons. It wasn’t that long ago that humans knew a couple hundred people and read the paper and a few books. We have got to give ourselves a break because no one else is going to give it to us. Shut your kitchen down. Shut your social down. Put an out-of-office on your personal email. We need our own permission slips to care less about some things so we can care more about finding and funding and defending the things that light us up.

Here’s my recommendation for a little Sunday journaling in the afternoon sun: Use the past week of stirring up the pot of gratitude to see which regrets are adding that depth of flavor to the stew. Write down all the joy-giving things in your life, from things you do frequently to things you rarely get to do. Then, write down your regrets and what you would do differently. The reality is, we can always start “differently” right now. Be more honest, commit more deeply, love bigger, draw stronger boundaries, and so on. Finally, give yourself a time-constrained off-season. Put it on the calendar. “Do not spend time picking up the house.” Because it doesn’t matter how good your list of loves’n’loathes is if you don’t give your brain the space to figure out how to apply that to your life.

So when I’m re-shaping that ball of clay called life, I try to remember this:

Gratitude tells us what we’re getting right

Regret tells us what we could get right

And rest tells us how

It’s been almost a decade since I was this excited about my own ball of clay. It took one off-season to realize what I had, one to realize what I wanted, and this one to finally pursue it. Thank you being the ones to help me shape it.

The graves have a way of finding you here.

I took Cooper for a walk the other day, and I try to take a new trail every time. Trails branch off at random, sometimes old mining roads, sometimes game trails well-traveled enough to dupe a novice and tempt a regular. But this one branched past an old dilapidated cabin, windows smashed and guts covered in dust and leaves. Just past the rotten home, maybe 20 feet into the woods, there was a wooden post sticking some three feet up from the ground. It had the usual marks of man — straight, smooth, standing erect. I stepped through the deadfall to get a closer look. Every other piece of planed wood was either collapsing into the cabin or already ground-bound, rotting back to its mother. At the base of the stud were rocks piled in a pyramid of sorts, holding it in place, and beside the rocks, two moss covered statues the size of small rabbits. Beneath their soft, green blankets were two angels, kneeling by the post, one with their stone hands clasped looking up, the other with their hands on the ground, staring into it.

A marker read, “You were so much STRONGER and BRAVER and SWEETER than I will ever Be. I’ll miss you. Love Peter”

In lettering lost in time, you can just make out the name: Henrietta.

Just up the dirt road from our house is the cemetery, unfenced and unkept. There’s a swing strung between two old aspens, and you can kick your feet high above the handful of graves below. One gravestone shares two names — both children, laid to rest more than 100 years ago. In the center of their grave bed, a massive pine has splintered the stone with her roots made of bones and breath. Even with a cemetery in town, there are graves everywhere. Marked or forgotten, along the town’s edges, on the mountain, and in the mountain where men and burros were held hostage and held forever in the mines. There are two memorials right now in a town with fewer people than my graduating class in rural Ohio. One waves with prayer flags on a grassy knoll overlooking the old part of town. Beneath the flags, a photo of a girl my age, riding horseback through town. The other is in the cemetery, a mound dug and buried the day we moved in. As we unpacked our moving truck on a warm July day, cars with license plates from up and down the Rockies parked along our street to pay tribute. On the gravestone hangs the collar and tags of the man’s dog. He was 42.

I can’t walk by or even near Henrietta’s grave without talking to her, the peculiarity of which is heightened by the fact that it’s hard to tell if Henri was a girl or a dog. Either way, the conversations are the same:

“How’re the woods today? Any good visitors? Anything you’d like me to see?”

In the chance there’s some connective tissue between now and every then, I’m following the golden rule. I personally would like people to talk to me, to be curious, to be revenant. How fast do you think I could trip someone with a well-placed root if they were one of those people who carried speakers into the woods? How deeply could I infect their psyche if they defaced my resting place or hurt an animal?

Thus far, if Henrietta seems anything, it’s suspicious. Which is fine. I would be too. But she’s not the only one I’m talking to. In a deeper canyon, six miles by foot from the house, you can feel the enormity of time. A box canyon closing in on you with a swampy bottom, talus fields, waterfalls, and a scree climb to the ridge. Something that feels pulled from Land Before Time or referenced for some untouched world space saga. Alone on a misty trail run, I felt safe enough from the eyes of judgment that I knelt on the ground, my bare hands on the soil, and shared my intentions with the Earth: her kingdom is my gift to hold tenderly and her right to take quickly. I stayed on my knees until I forgot how it might look to someone coming, and I stayed a little longer after that until the connection loosened and I felt the dirt in my fingernails.

I dusted off my knees and my hands and carried on running. Around the next bush, I came to a quick halt — there in the middle of the path was a porcupine, as startled to see me as I was her. Nature, providing an offering and a test. Are you a good steward? Can you see this moment for what it is? I stepped back and spoke softly until the porcupine waddled deep into the brush. I carried on with that feeling of earned reverence in my heart, talking mostly to myself.

As we approach Halloween, the town has yet to unveil any inherent spookiness beyond the reality of death. Hard work and hard loss are etched in, but there’s no unease. And maybe there never will be if I keep talking to all the dead people and animals, the dying trees, the creatures long absorbed into the ground.

Several people asked me if I feel safe here, especially out in the wilderness on my own. Some people don’t know any better. They never learned the animals are mostly harmless. They never read the research that you’re much more likely to die at the hands of your partner than at those of a stranger. They never knew I already escaped those hands anyway. They never learned to read the sky and the mountain. Never learned to read me.

But whatever I am safe from here, I think more about what I am safe to be here: odd. Solitary. The kind of woman who kneels, palms in the soil, to feel time and purpose crawl up her spine vertebrae by vertebrae like a wooden roller coaster, hoping to stay in the moment long enough to feel the freefall of getting lost in time.

Whatever strange, backwoods habits this town enables, it also draws you in from the deathly calls of the winter wind with emails like this:

On Sunday, meet in the town square at 5pm in COSTUME for the parade, pizza, and the photo. Trick or treating starts at 6pm on the old side of town. Ryan will transport the kids to the other side of town and back at night. Add Town Hall to your trick or treating to meet the new Town Manager, John.

You want me to… wear a costume? To take a town photo? And meet the new town manager? Guys there are 150 people here. If you stand outside your house for longer than 5 minutes, you’ll meet the new town manager.

But that’s small town life. And I bought Halloween candy weeks ago to prepare for our first-ever trick’or’treaters. Hopefully after a few years of talking to ghosts in the pines, I won’t need a costume. The local kids will be scared enough as is.

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