The irony isn't lost on us that my friend and I both received targeted ads for a Getaway trip to a remote tiny cabin. It's an experience designed to enable guests to completely disconnect; there's no wifi, there's a small cellphone lockbox (that I didn't use -- baby steps), there are enforced quiet hours 24/7, and the only mirror is a palm-sized one hanging on a nail in the cabinet.
Getaway found us through the very mechanisms from which, they claim, we must escape -- social media, targeted ads, passive consumerism, constant noise.
And we ate it up.
Because, of course, there's substantial truth in this. We desperately needed it. My friend had just gotten out of a serious relationship. I'd just left the only full-time job I've ever had with no other job lined up after months of caring for a sick loved one.
Also, let's face it, if Getaway hadn't used these strategies, they wouldn't have found us. I don't think pinning a flier to a tree would have had the same effect.
As my train pulled away from the familiar city symphony you stop noticing after a while and I replaced it with crunching gravel and stillness, I began to think of Thoreau. Granted, our trip was hardly a Walden experience. We were gone for two days in a cabin with electricity, running water, and a fully functioning toilet.
Yet, when our lives slanted, we went to the woods. There is something that happens when you shrink down your living space and give up Wifi. When you remove the shouting and music from outside your window. When you step away from working with every free minute you have. And, instead, you go to a super market in the middle of nowhere and buy farm-fresh eggs which you cook on a tiny two-burner stove top using only the light from the window. And you take the long way on an unmarked trail on the side of a steep mountain. And you read an entire book in two days. And you don't think about what you look like.
I wonder if perhaps it's tough to know when you're effectively living deliberately. Maybe it's easier to spot when you're not. Of course, any life epiphanies that happen on vacation must surely fall under a surface-level, temporary "enlightenment," yet stripping everything away -- even for a brief moment -- helped me recenter. It helped validate that I had been spreading myself too thin. That I was burnt out. That something absolutely had to give, and that leaving my job was the jump out of the plane I needed.
Our lives are so precious and our time is so short. It's a lesson I've learned again and again.
I am always at my best when I am being pushed and challenged, and when I can get in bed at the end of the day feeling proud of the work I've accomplished. When that progress halts, without fail, that's when I start to feel stuck. That's when unhappiness settles in. That's when I feel like I'm wasting my life.
Spending two nights in the woods forced me to notice every minute of the day. It made me take in the world around me instead of rushing past it during my daily routine. It forced me to reckon with the fact that everything is limited and none of us has the luxury of willing the clock to tick faster, waiting for something to end. There should be no shame in change and wanting something different for yourself. Growth can lead to outgrowth. And sometimes, the best way forward is through taking a step back.
Back reunited with my technology and urban chaos, I carry with me my slice of deliberation as I figure out my next chapter. There's beauty in simplistic cooking, there's joy in sun-drenched reading, the right kind of hard work is invigorating and not draining, and nothing is more restorative than quality time with a good friend and her dog.