Don't Fall in the Mud
Don't Fall in the Mud
Or, how to balance between the now and the later
What was it Thoreau said about the woods? Something about going to the woods to live deliberately and to focus on the essentials.1 And what is it that Ishmael says at the very start of Moby Dick? Not, not the part about his name. The part where he says,
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”2
Well, I didn’t take to the sea last week, but I did take to the hills. And the trip wasn’t a reaction to the mood of the moment, but a long-planned adventure on Vermont’s Long Trail with my best friend, combined with a solo venture to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Leading up to our start date, I had, in fact, been feeling a sort of November of the soul, and I’d been looking forward to the week in the woods as a chance to step off the conveyor belt of my current projects. I had been looking forward to the seven days when I could put my phone on airplane mode, shoulder my pack, and just walk.
As can happen when you go into the woods and mountains, our plans changed. Instead of seven days on the Long Trail, we had three, wisely opting to leave the trail once it was clear that our team of two was dealing with a head cold that was only getting worse. There is no valor in continuing on when you’re about to enter a remote section of an already remotish trail, and will need to commit for another twenty miles before the next option to head home. But in the three days we hiked from Massachusetts to the Vermont border and then northward on the section of the Appalachian Trail that doubles as the Long Trail, my friend and I got our fill of hiking experiences.
Twenty-four hours of pouring rain. Trails that were identical to mud pits—or to dumps of large boulders. One and a half hours of hiking in the dark with headlamps. Lots of salami and trail mix. Filtering stream water for hydration. Wringing out socks to put back on inside our soaked shoes. Sunlight—finally—coming through yellow beech and ash leaves. The forest with all its layers of overstory down to ground cover. Mosses and salamanders and caterpillars. Water on purpose—in the form of little rills and a whitewater stream/river and several beaver ponds. We had it all, while shouldering packs that were far heavier than they should have been.3
There were many wonderful things about these three days and the two days I spent in the White Mountains (made possible by an overnight in Greenleaf Hut). I think the best was airplane mode. For three and then two days, I received no communications unless I generated a message on my satellite Garmin device. I checked my phone only to use an offline mapping app to monitor our wayfinding. Or to take pictures. It was bliss.
And the very act of hiking in mud and puddles (or, really, streams) required a kind of concentration that I found rewarding.
To keep your feet on a hike or a trail run, you have to pay very close attention to the now. Especially if you’re running, you really can’t let your attention wander if you want to have the best chance of not eating dirt. At the same time, your mind does think about what comes later. How’s the pace? Will you make the shelter you’re planning on in time? Do you have enough water to cover your time hiking? On a trail run—like the Vermont 50, which I ran (the 50km event) two weeks ago—you have to balance your focus on the now with your attention to the later of your overall pace. For instance, you might feel tempted at the start of a race to go faster. You feel good, you tell yourself! You’re cruising! Heck, you can go a bit faster than your planned average pace! But do that at your peril. If you do that, you’re forgetting the later. You’re being seduced by the ease of the now and will end up in a miserable later, spent and worn down too soon.
With the phone on airplane mode, it’s possible to hold these two seemingly opposing attitudes in your mind at once. It’s possible to balance between the now of those steps across a rushing stream and the later of the endurance you’ll achieve with your steady pace. Or to focus on the now of each individual soggy step without worrying about the deluge of the later. With yourself on airplane mode, it’s possible to keep from being pulled too far in either direction, from being all now or all later. You breathe more easily. Your mind stills.
Three hours before I returned to my car I’d left the previous day in the Lafayette Campground parking lot in Franconia Notch, I sat at the top of Mount Liberty and took in the view to the west. (The view is 360 degrees there, but I had a nice slab of rock to rest on and look out over the Pemigewasset Wilderness.) I didn’t want to come down. It was a spectacular day of royal-blue sky and orange and yellow leaves on the hardwood trees, warm for early October. And I was still in airplane mode, literally and figuratively.
I had gone to my equivalent of the sea, like Ishmael, and had sought the woods, like Thoreau. This sounds quite self-aggrandizing, but all I really mean is that I’d been feeling pressured and stressed and pulled by notifications and pings and Slacks and SMS and had needed to get away. And I did.
Obviously, it’s not possible to do this all the time, or even very often. But are there small ways to go into even a figurative airplane mode just often enough to keep from knocking people’s hats off in the street?
Do Not Disturb on the phone?
Airplane mode for certain chunks of time?
A radical thought: reinstating a landline for emergency calls so that you can walk away from your smartphone and all its pings and chimes?
Planning the day so there are off-grid times?
The solution lies, maybe, in thinking more about the later even when the harried now is tolerable. It’s too easy to accept all the ways in which our lives are pulled and interrupted all the time, when that hyper-alerted now is actually going to mess us up for later. We need to find a balance between those two focuses, and find a way to be connected in the modes that contemporary life demands while still keeping the right pace, the right focus on the endurance we’re going to need for further down the road.
I’m not really ready to give up airplane mode. As one way of holding on to it, I’m giving serious thought to instituting a more organized, delineated schedule within the parts of my working day that are currently fungible.4 Got any advice for me?
What do you do to cope with the drizzly Novembers of your soul?
The full quotation from Walden is: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”
The full Melville sentence is: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
We now know where and how to trim weight for next time.
This is the curse of the self-employed creative—the reality that we can move our work around the clock to different times, which can quickly become all the time.
I've had 2 major emergencies since the cell phone era and both times it was not available. Once while walking my dog in the woods before work, I slipped on ice and broke my ankle in 3 places. It was a very early Sunday morning, 13 degrees, so I was the only one on the trail. And, I had left my phone in the car, so, I had to reset the floppy ankle, hold it in my Ugg boot like a sling, and drag myself to the road. The second time, I was in a remote area in Vermont when my mother died unexpectedly. The police were trying to reach me for 2 days before, by chance, my BF went into town for coffee and saw his phone had blown up. Both emergencies were dealt with eventually, but I realized that using the excuse that I need my phone near me for "emergencies" is a crock. For the most part, I check my emails in the morning and then not again for the rest of the day, and the cell phone is put away for the night before dinner. But I still think more time away from it would be beneficial, so I appreciate this reminder!
I loved this post and could relate in several ways. Like you, I put my phone on airplane mode on the trail. During a regular day, I take breaks by going outside (usually to care for the horses and chickens), and during that time I organize my thoughts or simply chill out); I deliberately leave my phone inside, out of earshot for notifications. I also try to read about 20 minutes of a novel every morning before getting on my device. This morning, depressed about the state of the world, I put aside what I was supposed to do and baked muffins instead.
How was VT50K?