Good morning Reader,
Two weeks is the most they let you stay in Chattahoochee Bend State Park south of Atlanta, which was the perfect length and place to begin my three-month writing retreat earlier this year. So on that last morning I broke camp, packed up the RV, and pulled out. My next stop was Black Rock Mountain State Park north of the city, which meant a long drive through and around all of the big peach sprawl.
The first part of my drive gave the same serene peace I had found in Chattahoochee. Forty-five minutes of farmland, rolling hills, country roads without lines separating the lanes. Three-quarters of an hour before I reached anything you could call traffic. Rural America doing her thing, the kind of peaceful flow you stop noticing after two weeks in the forest because it had become the air I was breathing.
And then I rolled into the first stoplight.
The intersection was still miles from the Atlanta skyline, outside of the outskirts, in threshold country. There was no real hustle to it, just a left turn lane, a gas station on one corner, some small businesses on the other, and trees still standing around the edges. It was nothing to speak of, a modest intersection on the way to somewhere else.
There, as I rolled up behind the handful of cars and watched others come and go through the four-way, I felt my whole body change.
My shoulders. My breath. Something in my chest drew tight, the way a hand closes without being told to. My mind did the same thing in the same instant, bracing for a version of the world that had not arrived. One stoplight. That was all it took. I was fascinated by it, sitting at that red light watching my own nervous system answer a threat that was not even there, wondering how long my body had known how to respond this way without asking me first.
I have thought about that stoplight for weeks, because when I pulled into the driveway of my life three months later, I came home to ten times the reality any one stoplight could hold, and I have been seeking wisdom from that difference ever since.
At the stoplight I could feel the tightening because I had just spent two weeks without the physical sensation of stress, the mental anguish of lack, the emotional drain of worry. I had a before, a two-week state park retreat, to measure it against. At home there is no before. There is no retreat. At home, life is a constant intersection of its own demands.
At home, the tightening I felt at the stoplight takes the shape of the ordinary hum of a fine life. It is the drive to work I can do with my eyes closed. It is the time of day I come home for dinner, the honey-do list waiting on Saturday, the same conversations with the same people. I had lived inside that familiarity so long that I had stopped seeing the possibilities of the unfamiliar.
Out on the road there was almost no familiarity, and that turned out to be the gift. Every day was a new place, a new trail, a new face at the register who had no history with me and no expectation of me. Those serendipitous conversations, the ones with a fellow camper or a stranger a mile up the trail, went deeper and faster than most of the familiar ones I have had for years. There were no roles to keep up and no script we had both memorized, just two people briefly awake, telling each other something real before moving on. The unfamiliar kept pulling depth out of me, and the familiar, I am learning, had been dulling me for years.
I came home to a good life I built. Gail, and forty years of us. The lake out back. Work that has meant something. I found it familiar in a way that felt like a loss. The life is good, and nothing in it is wrong. On the road I had touched something it was not giving me, alone in the mornings with my Celsius and my journal, the trail waiting for my hiking shoes in the afternoon. A depth. Coming home felt, if I am honest, like stepping out of a bigger room and having the door close quietly behind me.
I understand now that the deepest tiredness and exhaustion in me over the years came from doing less than what I was being pulled toward, even called toward, and never from doing too much. I had kept a good life running for years, competent and faithful and on time, and still felt myself living next to it instead of inside it. The structure holds. Everything is fine. The days produce evidence of an expected life, and underneath the evidence something deeper waits for its turn, patient in the way that costs you the most, because patience like that can go on forever.
So the pull to go back is real. I feel it in my chest some mornings. For a while I was sure I knew what it meant. It meant leave again. Pack up the RV, fill the tires and the fridge, find the next state park, chase the aliveness back down.
Then this morning, in the middle of writing these very words, two sandhill cranes came down out of the sky and landed in my backyard. We don't get them here often. Red foreheads, those impossibly thin legs, walking across the grass by the lake like they owned the whole place and were doing me a favor by stopping by. I put the pen down and watched our two guests, and for a few minutes I was as awake, as alive, as I was on any trail in the Carolinas.
I had not driven anywhere to find it. It came to me, in the yard I had stopped seeing, beside the lake that had become familiar. The only thing different about this morning was that I was paying the kind of attention the road had taught me to pay. Those cranes have landed here before, and I have always loved them. This was the first morning they felt like an answer.
The three months traveling from state park to state park gave me intentionality on a grand scale. I left the familiar behind and built entire days around contemplation and trails and whoever I happened to meet. Out there, away from it all, I felt at home. That was the unsustainable, utopian version, and it was a gift I would not trade. But I cannot live my one life as a permanent escape from it.
The work in front of me now is smaller and harder to romanticize. It is the here and now of a responsible life, protecting the yearning deep within me inside the structure of my ordinary days. It means guarding a morning before the day can claim it, and refusing to let the calendar decide who I am allowed to be by nine o'clock. It means learning to tell the real pulls from the imagined ones, and the true obligations from the ones I only inherited and never chose.
The road proved what I yearn for is available to me. The cranes proved it is available here, on a morning I almost spent with my head down over the page. For a while I read the longing to go back into the woods as a verdict that I had built the wrong life. I had it backward. The longing is a sign that there is more of me available than my familiar days have been drawing on. I thought it was telling me to leave again. It was only ever asking for one honest thing this morning, the one moment of putting the pen down to watch two birds cross the grass, and it will ask again tomorrow. A thing that small, I can do.
This week, put something down for one minute and look. Something you long since decided was ordinary may be standing right there in the yard, red-capped and unbothered, walking around like it owns the place.