TOO MUCH TRAVEL?

I’ve long said that travel is the best antidote to the up-and-down swirls I feel due to mental health challenges. A quick trip to Whistler or Seattle can calm my nerves, lift my mood or just provide a preventive booster to keep me on track. 

 

I’m not sure how I’d feel about travel as part of work, the kind where you check in to one hotel after another and spend 9 to 5 in one office tower after another, then unwind in a bar seven floors down from your room. That seems like travel without the experiences that make being away from home so special. No matter how luxurious they may be, I don’t want to sign up for what are basically hotel room tours. A successful trip involves as little time in the room as possible (and time in an office cubicle doesn’t count at all). 

 

Still, I’ve often thought that, if I could land a kind of job where I’m paid to venture to cities and countries and hop on trains or roam in a rental car from city to beach from art museum to funky café, I’d have found my sweet spot. Bring on the next destination!

 

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

But here I am, momentarily between trips, three days at home after being away most of the past month and heading out again for two more months. So far I’ve covered Taos, Denver, Halifax, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. Upcoming: Portland, Canyonlands National Park, Denver, New York City, Dallas, Aspen and another stint in New Mexico along with a few places that haven’t been slotted in yet. 

 

To be sure, I am lucky. Privileged, in fact. I’ve loved going to each place up till now and I have no doubt I will thoroughly enjoy the places to come but these three days at home aren’t so much about rest but instead are filled with preparation for the next two months: a bike tune-up, an oil change, a laptop repair, a volunteer shift, a mortgage renewal, medication refills, a library stop, an insurance appointment, a meeting with a writing colleague, unpacking and packing, hotel bookings and loads of laundry among other things. No doubt, there is an item or two I’m forgetting. It feels like a lot.

 

I’d be okay with it—I think—if one item weren’t left off the list: writing. I define myself as a writer. Writing essays, outlining a new story and revising a manuscript bring me joy. I don’t have the time or the focus for these tasks right now and they fell off my radar during the most recent week of travel. As I take to the road for another extended period, I don’t see a time in the near future when I can fit in a few decent writing sessions. 

 

That boost I feel from travel is taking a hit from the absence of writing as my passion. I just can’t balance the two at present. It’s put me in an unfamiliar sort of funk that is clouding the glory of travel adventure.

 

Writing just doesn’t fall off my agenda.

 

Even during my first stint in a psych ward, when they took away all my possessions, including my backpack with a writing notebook, I found the fortitude and the supplies—a single sheet of white paper and one of those teensy pencils they give you at miniature golf—to write. I wrote my ideas in the tiniest print possible, filling up every inch on both sides of the paper. In my deepest ever depression, writing was what gave me hope that I could continue to be something once discharged. 

 

It’s scary to not be writing. What if ideas and inspiration don’t come back when I’m ready to slot in more writing time? What if this unprecedented break just keeps going?  

 

I have four days by myself on the road beginning tomorrow. I have a pad of paper, pens and pencils always placed in the driver’s side door pocket. As I navigate some of the less scenic patches of highway, I hope to be that guy talking aloud to himself as speedier drivers pass. Let the ideas flow again. I don’t care whether they’re about a current project or something entirely new. Let me start thinking like a writer again. Let the ideas feel so urgent and compelling that I find myself pulling over at rest stops or even the road shoulder to scribble my thoughts on that pad of paper. I normally enjoy the quiet time but I’m hoping, as this trip begins, there will be a lot of noise inside my head. The good kind. The kind that affirms that, yes, I am still a writer.

 

     

 

  

AT A LOSS FOR WORDS

I’m a writer. I pride myself in the precision of word choice and the way I phrase things to represent my voice. Basically, words matter.

 

I’m also a sixty-year-old. I pride myself in looking younger and fitter than the average guy my age. Still, I get called “sir” more than I’d like, age spots are popping up on my body and there are plenty of other indignities.

 

One of the indignities intersects with my identity as a writer. In recent months, I’ve sometimes struggled with word choice. I sit in front of my laptop, cursor blinking, waiting, waiting…

 

It’s not that I’m searching my brain for a five-syllable word for nice or a metaphor to represent the lingering ache in my legs after a once run-of-the-mill hike. Instead, I’m grasping for something ordinary, a basic term I’ve known since I was four. The word hovers but fails to land. It’s there, tip of the tongue, back of my mind, perhaps slumbering somewhere in my pinky finger. It refuses to appear in a useful part of my brain so I can type it and quiet that dang blinking cursor for a moment or two.

 

While at Evan’s Colorado cabin, I’d gone to a café to write and he texted to see if I could buy some garden pruners, itself a challenging task in a place that was a village at most. I stopped into the convenience store, hoping pruners might share a shelf with bean dip, Doritos and Super Soakers. 

 

No luck. (No surprise.)

 

I asked if there was a…a…a…something or other nearby. The term escaped me. 

 

“Is there a…?

 

“A…”

 

My face reddened. My armpits activated. What was the name for a store that carries lots of varied items for gardens and home improvement? They sell mirrors, rope, kitchen tiles, peat moss and, yes, pruners.

 

My brain failed to cough up anything. It was on sleep mode. It’s not fun when my thinking organ decides to play a practical joke on myself.

 

I finally came up with a vague description instead of the term. “Is there a lumber place with tools nearby?”

 

It worked well enough. The owner gave me directions to a shopping center ten minutes away that included a Home Depot and a Walmart. Yes! I was on my way. Home Depot would definitely have pruners.

 

But, as I drove off, I continued to search my brain for what one might call a lumber place with tools. I knew I’d overemphasized the “lumber” element.  

 

Three minutes into my drive, I abruptly pulled into a parking lot for a garden store. Perfect! I’d support an independent business. Pruners purchased.

 

Still, my brain was not forthcoming with what I’d meant when I asked about a lumber place with tools. I fretted about my aging mind. I went dark. Was this the beginning of early-onset dementia?

 

Too often, a forgetful moment now leads to dementia panic.

 

Halfway back to the cabin, the term came to mind at last. Hardware store! In the empty car, I articulated the question as I’d wanted it to be: “Is there a hardware store nearby?” The dashboard was not impressed. In fact, it was nonresponsive. I was relieved nonetheless.

 

The other day, I had another episode of the mind going blank. An incorrect phrase popped in my head as I wrote a passage—“a fiction of one’s imagination.” This was clearly wrong. Fiction and imagination had too much overlap. There was a redundancy. Fiction was not the right word. Still, the more I tried to recall the correct expression, the more my brain doubled down.

 

A fiction of one’s imagination.

A fiction of one’s imagination.

A fiction of one’s imagination.

 

Stop it, brain. Let me think. 

 

Fiction. Fiction. Fiction.

 

This time, the wait wasn’t as long, but I was plenty frustrated with myself. “A figment of my imagination.” Yes! I was so flustered though, I chose not to use the phrase at all. I didn’t want a reminder of my faulty brain in the passage.

 

Again, I worried. Early-onset dementia?

 

This would be detrimental—no, devastating—to me as a writer. This cannot be happening.

 

There are other instances of word recall malfunctions in the past two weeks. I happen to forget them now. Is that itself a problem?!

 

In a calmer state while writing this blog post and having everything enter my brain and transfer to my Word document in a timely fashion, I am telling myself I have nothing to worry about. It’s normal to sometimes struggle to find the right words. The occasional delay or all-out failure to recall something is not a sign of dementia. When I was thirty, I am sure I stumbled with my words from time to time as well. Why should I descend into dark thinking now that I am sixty?

 

The answer is obvious. Because I am sixty. I’m older. Age spots don’t lie. I must monitor my body and brain. The fact that words, sentences and paragraphs easily spewed from my mind this morning is reassuring. I can put aside doomsday thinking about dementia.

 

Until the next time my brain fails me.