Everybody, I left my house last week.
As a matter of fact, I left my entire state last week.
I know. Yes, thank you, I am okay. The panic attacks have mostly subsided, and the blood pressure is nothing a few more listens to the 1996 self-titled Backstreet Boys import album can’t take care of.
By now the CDC has given us a cautious green light on domestic travel, even air travel, if ya vaccinated (and still with a mask, for the love of God), but this trip was planned slightly before that. And well, I’m a rule follower. I am also a teacher pleaser, a tryhard, and a sometimes self-righteous concerned citizen, and damn it I did not want to let Dr. Fauci down.
On the one hand, however, I was looking at a two-week spring break with two kids who are tired of everything in this house, including its occupants. On the other, oh, the COVID humanity. Variants and vaccine effectiveness and public safety. Individual risk-benefit analysis and airborne transmission and our duty to our fellow humans and it’s been a calendar year of hypervigilance and STICK A FORK IN ME JERRY, I’M DONE.
Ultimately, after much obsessing and research (from me, the household COVID monitor, which is a whole other emotional labor thing), we decided we could cobble together something from the “safer” column of the CDC’s travel recommendations. We could pack up the kids, the masks, and a bunch of food, and we could drive to someplace with more bears than people.
Still, I rode the anxiety train right up to the last minute. Even as we packed the car, I worried about bathroom stops and the great maskless hordes I imagined lurking at rest areas. I worried about our supply of alcohol wipes and whether that could possibly have been a cough from my daughter. I was pretty sure, stuffing every pocket of my mom backpack with extra masks, that it was better to just call the whole thing off and stay home, where I could remain in CONTROL OF ALL THE THINGS.
Then we got there, away from the things.
We spent a week with no cell service and weak Wifi, forcing our children to argue with each other on picturesque hiking trails instead of in front of their iPads. I sat next to a mossy waterfall. I hiked to the top of a foggy mountain. I toasted a perfectly crisp marshmallow.
And I was forced to reconsider my position on leaving the house.
We humans can get acclimated to a lot of stuff—stress, intermittent fasting, light wash denim. Matthew Walker says the grift on sleep deprivation is that all those people who swear they only need five hours a night just don’t remember what it was like to get eight. They’ve become acclimated to being sloppy, fatigue-addled zombies, and they truly believe they’re doing fantastic.
Turns out that was me. Except it wasn’t sleep (I haven’t seen the other side of 9:30 since like 2005); it was novelty. I’d been wearing ruts in my carpet so deep I didn’t remember what life was like when I went new places, saw new things, smelled new plants. I forgot entirely what a change of scenery could do for my resting level of aliveness, and so I assumed I did not need it.
I felt fine this winter, I really did. I mean, February was sort of terrible, but only slightly more than usual. I bundled up, organized my office, and sank into the soft Jell-O of my introversion. I wrote and I read, I petted my dog and I tended to my family. There was nothing left to do but shoot my lime-flavored gaze at people wearing their masks under their noses and await a non-COVID-related death.
What traveling did for me last week is what traveling always does, I suppose—it broke the emergency glass. It made me aware that I’ve felt alive but been slightly undead. The big blind spot in my personal wellness vehicle isn’t lack of sleep, it’s lack of vitality.
Sure, at times this year I’ve laid inert on my couch, watching the Apple TV backgrounds shuffle past, and fantasized about how much kinder, prettier, and more creative I’d be if I lived next to a glistening lake or a cascading waterfall. But those fantasies had no teeth behind them. I didn’t want to actually go to those places; I just wished I was the type of person who was already there.
Traveling helps with that, too. It reminds you, once you’re in the reality of the waterfall, that you don’t want to live there. You just want to visit.
The reality of the waterfall—or whatever scene your smart TV is mocking your doughy, couchbound form with—is a minute of peaceful contemplation, followed by several minutes of being hot, thirsty, and worried about the spiderweb next to you and whether that might be the faint twiddling of a banjo in the distance.
You’re too human to enjoy the reality for long. What you need is the memory. In the memory of the waterfall, you sat for hours. You were present, filled with the abundance of nature and the cold, pure spring water you did not set on the deck railing and then forget to take with you. You were kinder, prettier, and more creative, too. Travel memories are blurry and generous like that.
And I’d been missing them.
It’s a lot of work to take a low-risk trip at the moment, and if you are still feeling like they can pry your Doordash account from your cold, dead hands, I get it. If you’re shaking your head and/or fist at me and saying I’m part of the ursine COVID epidemic, I get that, too. It is still, without a doubt, easier and safer to stay put.
But if you’re feeling like a thin candy shell of your pre-pandemic self, I would gently offer that you might try busting out just once. Safely, of course, with mask and vaccine and Germ-X, but still out.
You don’t have to go far—my pristine, unstamped passport and I have nothing to say about exotic locales anyway—but maybe you could go new. Maybe you could equip your mask and visit a museum one town over. Or find the nearest lake and attempt to keep a canoe upright. Or patronize a local Victorian doll store or Crocs outlet or some other shop you never thought you’d be caught dead in, just so you can feel alive.
We’re not back to full-on, crowded theme park, germ-swapping “normal” yet, and I couldn’t handle it if we were. A short trip was a manageable first step. And just as no one in my world is truly happy if I’m sleep deprived, I think I have more to offer when I’m caught up on vitality, too.
