I measure my life success by the places I’ve visited, and my only life regrets are centered around the lands that I have not yet traveled. (Africa and India are the stand-outs). Traveling outside my comfort zone, witnessing the world beyond my borders, is my absolute favorite thing to do. It’s good to get away.
And then there’s my other absolute favorite thing to do, which is living a day-to-day business-as-usual life with my (now fiancé) McDuff. After nearly six months of finding and practicing our daily groove in Seattle, McDuff and I were officially engaged on Boxing Day in Charleston SC. Now we have the added pleasure of folding wedding planning into our nesting adventures. Having known and loved McDuff for a decade, we are finally living our bliss. It’s good to be home.
Proposal at The Gin Joint in Charleston, SC
There will be no Africa or India this year (and probably not next year), but 2012 will yield a variety of adventures within the United States and around our backyard in the Pacific Northwest. We’ll descend upon a wedding in Vermont, a graduation in North Carolina, and Thanksgiving in Texas. And since some of the most beautiful scenery this planet has to offer is right here in Western Washington, we’ll be micro-retreating to Vancouver, Victoria, Suttle Lake, Lake Crescent and the Olympic Peninsula, Mount St Helens, and Snoqualmie Falls. It’s good to get away, especially so close to home.
View from the ferry to Port Townsend, WA (McDuff's amazing photo)
Though the Seattle forecast currently predicts sun for the remainder of this week, no Seattle-ite can deny that the cloudy season is upon us. We must rely on our (heavily-caffeinated) sunny dispositions to sustain us until July. Fortunately the quality of life here, especially in our neighborhood, is easily conducive to the good life - even for those high in motivation but lacking in follow-through (such as myself). Therefore I’ve compiled a few 2012 Rules of Engagement for Sustaining a Sunny Disposition. I haven’t had much success with resolutions, so I’m hoping that the more formally contractual Rules of Engagement (RoE) concept will keep me honest.
- Live in my own time zone. No one but me is insisting that I must work east coast hours every day. The constant sleep deprivation makes me alternate between t-rex and comatose without warning and at astonishing speed. No one wins in this situation. Zombies are neither fun nor sexy.
- Lose control. I don’t have to control everything, especially at work. The most rewarding part of my job is bringing out the best in others, but they can’t find their best if I don’t give them the space to be creative and make mistakes.
- Cultivate outside of work. I tend to give every ounce I have to work, and then give the tiny bits remaining to less noble pursuits (see CSI:Miami marathon mention below). This RoE requires sub-bullets:
- Rock the mat. I average making it to yoga and/or pilates once a week. I’m not saying I can go every day, but it is totally reasonable for me to go more than one time a week. CSI: Miami marathons are not an acceptable excuse to skip class. Neither is using the excuse that I just had a beer and therefore it wouldn’t be ethical to go to yoga with toxins in my system.
- Rock the blog. Finally back in motion after an extended hiatus. Honestly, my blog objective is a little unclear to me, but maybe I should reference RoE 2 and just go with it without trying to control the outcome. We’ll see how it all unfolds.
- Rock the fiction. See, I love to read fiction. But I’m also a non-fiction self-help junkie. JUNKIE. And I’m finding that, if I’m truly honest about it,(and often I am not), those books make me feel more inadequate than inspired. That tells me my balance is off somewhere, so I am therefore prescribing a self-help reprieve for my condition and have resolved to only read fiction in 2012 (magazine articles not included!). My immediate fiction list is ambitious but exhilarating: 1Q84 (Haruki Murakami), Lamb (Christopher Moore), and The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), plus Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop. I have posted her most famous poem below to close out this blog post with a bang created by someone else.
I notice that it is no mistake that all of these RoE are in support of helping me (us) solidify our groove here in this new life and this new land. And the more I honor the above RoE, and the more I feel like myself as a result, then the more this roamer will find the “here” just as contented as the “there.” It’s good to be home.
View of Space Needle from Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster
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