Choosing the light

I spent this week on the road in the typical whirlwind of updating a guidebook. There are storefronts to confirm, innkeepers to surprise, new restaurants to try, and new tours to take. I feel like the Tasmanian devil ripping through a city, trying to pack sights, sounds, sensory details and the facts into packages I can retrieve later as I write the book.

During this trip, in the spaces between, my mind kept returning to choices I’ve made over the years that led me to where I am today, The last few years have been especially rough, and at times when you’re shaking the piggy bank for gas money, it’s hard to keep the faith that self-employment is a smart move. I know many friends in similar boats – we could make a flotilla – where freelance work is just tough to come by right now. So I ruminate, plan, and second-guess when my choices seem to lead me astray.

Yesterday, as I drove home, I faced a decision point, a fork in the road. And I do mean that literally. When I drive home from Palatka, there’s a choice – I can drive into the Ocala National Forest, which I do 99.9% of the time, or take the road to Orange Springs.

Without thinking, I stayed on SR 19 like always and ascended the bridge. It was windy and in the distance I could see flashes of lightning. At the top of that ridiculously high bridge over the old barge canal, the future stared me in the face.

It was dark. Roiling clouds, black as night at 3 PM. The cars ahead of me streaked forward into it, a wall of water not far ahead. It was like God put up a hand and said “your usual path isn’t the smart choice. Think differently.”

I hit the brakes and did a u-turn at the road at the base of the bridge. Returned to the fork and took the road less traveled. It was sunny and bright. As I approached Orange Springs, I found a nice little restaurant with fast service, inexpensive food, and perfect sweet tea.

The sky remained clear. Sunny. Full of light. All the way home.

I got to the post office and discovered checks I’d been waiting on for weeks.

An editor called and offered me an assignment.

In my inbox at home, a client I was waiting on let me know she’s ready to start our project.

I sat down on the couch and breathed a sigh of relief, feeling unblocked for the first time in months. I’d chosen the light, and good things followed.

Trafalgar Square

Trafalgar Square

It was my first overnight in London, a mere 18 hours to soak in the ambiance before I re-entered the United States after a three month absence.  I was searching for a curry shop, and I found Trafalgar Square.

A million micro-decisions

I had a plumbing emergency Wednesday, and it worried me to let my landlord in to see it. In my eyes, my house was too much of a wreck to let anyone in to help with it.

Granted, I spent a month on the road and still haven’t fully unpacked from my trips, but papers covered every available surface – the kitchen table, both tables in the living room, my dresser, even the couch and easy chair and the TV stand.

In the end, with little time to waste, I grabbed a bin and swept every paper into it to deal with later.  Presto! The appearance of clean.

It’s that accumulata of life that gets in the way of living.

Papers to be sorted and filed, or read and discarded, take on a life of their own and take over everything. Piles of clothing, hiking gear, books – when not put away, they seem to grow and grow. Same with piles of unwashed dishes. It all multiplies.

I’ve been reorganizing my hard drives since I returned home, working on a mirroring scheme so I always have a backup. I’ve been at it for a week and seeing incremental progress. Data multiplies even worse than physical objects, it seems, for I have copies of my core photo libraries on six different drives, five at different stages of confusion as to which is the “right” one. I’m blending them into one with a single backup. It can take six hours to transfer one set of images from one drive to another. Somehow, I don’t think the cloud can solve this problem.

As I’m dealing with these masses of files, and these masses of paper, I realize that clutter – digital and actual – means millions of micro-decisions. Just the simple keep / toss decision, multiplied infinitely, leads to madness. No wonder I’d rather read a book than do the dishes!

The answer? There isn’t a magic bullet. Streamlining, organizing, and minimalizing are all a part of the mix, but it’s up to you – and me – to put forward a burst of effort and unearth ourselves from these piles we create so we can focus our decision-making faculties on greater goals.

Spring cleaning, anyone?

Bearfence Mountain

On Bearfence Mountain

I was fortunate, as a child, to grow up in a small town where the Appalachian Trail danced along the mountaintops that I could see from my bedroom window, and even more fortunate that my parents often took me for walks in the woods, sometimes on the Red Dot and Blue Dot trails that led to the AT.

As an adult, the AT remained beyond my grasp until the 1990s, when I made an effort to day hike along it in numerous spots, including Shenandoah National Park. Bearfence Mountain was one of the spots that scared the heck out of me. The blue blaze was a gentle enough route, but the white blazes led up a jagged course with deep fissures between the rocks, and never mind the rattlesnakes that might be sunning.