The Soul of Travel

The Soul of Travel

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A Wall Street Journal headline caught my eye: “The Surprising Mental Health Benefits of Getting Away.” This time last year I was away — with a week of travel left before our return. This year, a different to-do list for late summer.

But the research must be right, because it matches my lived experience. Of course travel improves mental health. How could it not? It keeps us on our toes. It provides opportunities for awe. It allows us to be ourselves in a way few other activities can.

Traveling can be as simple as driving somewhere without GPS assistance … or as complicated as a monthlong foray overseas.

What matters most, I think, is being in uncharted territory. You are on a subway that may or may not take you to Heathrow Airport. Your garret room is up four flights of rickety Alsatian stairs. It seems as if there is nothing you want to eat in all of Portugal.

So what? Life happens. And travel reminds us that it does. It’s not just good for the mind. It’s good for the soul.

Seasonal Expectations

Seasonal Expectations

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Weather does not always conform to our seasonal expectations. Take today, September 1. In my mind it should be fresh and crisp, like the first page of a new notebook or the crunch of autumn leaves under brand-new, too-tight penny loafers.

Instead, we have the opposite: full-bore summer, humid and limp, a feeling not of fullness but exhaustion. The papers on my desk speak of back-to-school diligence, but my mind is wandering.

I’m fantasizing about a late season getaway. It won’t happen, but it appeals. A trip to the shore where bikes rule and gulls soar, the freedom and fun of it.

A blue jay squawks and my mind snaps to attention. It’s September 1, it will be 97 degrees today, and I have work to do.

(No autumn leaves here.)

World of New Light

World of New Light

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It’s the quality of the light I notice most, its tints and texture, gradients and shading. The lick of flame from a gas burner is startlingly blue, another band in the spectrum. In the morning, window shades glow with a brilliant border. Bright light is everywhere, saturating the landscape, pouring in windows, illuminating forgotten corners. The light has become a place of its own.

When Mom’s cataracts were removed years ago, she looked at a room she’d recently painted and realized she hated the shade of green she’d chosen. We’d wondered what she’d seen in it. Turns out, she hadn’t seen it at all, only its yellowed cousin. Once she glimpsed the real hue, she repainted.

For me it’s the blues that have been a revelation. The cerulean paisley seat cushions on the deck, azure reflections in the glass-topped table, whites so bright they burn blue.

It makes sense: the cloudy lens is gone, a new one in its place. But nothing could have prepared me for the clean, bright world I would encounter in its wake. A world of new light.

Second Sight

Second Sight

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Cataract surgery number 2 was yesterday, and I’m getting used to my new eyes, to this second sight. It’s been less than 24 hours, so the verdict is still out, but already I know a couple of things. My house needs a good scrubbing and I’d forgotten how vibrantly colored the world can be.

The scrubbing will take care of itself. Or, actually, I will take care of it. And likely I’ll post about that too, when I get around to it.

What I want to write about today is how blind one can be to gradual change. It’s hard not to take my progressively cloudier vision as a metaphor. What other crusty exoskeleton am I building simply by living my life? Am I quicker to worry? To judge? Am I less likely to roll with things?

There’s no quick fix for these accretions. But there are books to read, ideas to explore, and family and friends who will, I hope, point out the ossifications when they appear, if only by an arched eyebrow and a quickly uttered, “are you sure?” I hope these guardrails are in place for me and that I provide them for others.

And then, there are miracles like cataract surgery, this second sight, to remind me to stay loose, stay limber, to look, see, question, and learn.

Globe Light

Globe Light

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I like globes, have a couple around the house. This one used to be downstairs in the living room, but a couple months ago I brought it up to my office. Its new location makes it possible for me to take advantage of a feature I never could before. Because of its proximity to a plug, I can turn it on.

Yes, this globe lights up. Not garishly, but in a calm, soft-focus way. Sometimes globe light is the only illumination in my office. And at nighttime, the image is reflected in the darkened window, as if a heavenly body floats just outside my window.

I like having an glowing globe beside me as I write. It reminds me that the world is large, that as I scribble in the darkness, a hot sun beats down on dusty villages in West Africa’s Sahel. It’s already morning there. Another day has begun.

A Spider and Her Web

A Spider and Her Web

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I’ve watched her for days, captivated as she weaves her web on the other side of the kitchen window. She disappeared for a while — no doubt hiding in a crack or some other nether region — then returned to lie in wait.

How does she catch anything? The screen must filter out all but the smallest gnats. Maybe gnats are delicacies for her, like a plate of those little won-ton appetizers would be for me, what appeals after nights of dutiful veggies and proteins.

Maybe this spider is running a candy store, eating all her wares. If she is a grass spider, as I think she might be, her days are numbered. She will mate (if I raise the screen and she escapes), lay eggs and perish.

The web she’s woven seems vaguely funnel-like, which is the kind grass spiders weave. It reminds me of stratus clouds in the summer, swirled into fanciful shapes that make a human mind marvel at all the wonders nature holds.

Still Summer

Still Summer

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Fairfax County schools started yesterday. When the girls were younger, the beginning of school marked the end of summer. Over the last week I’ve observed young families return from vacations, kiddos shoot hoops at the end of the cul-de-sac and play flashlight tag after dark, cramming in last-minute bits of fun.

As I watched, I felt in my bones that familiar dread, the pit in the stomach I had as a kid heading back to school, and later as a mom, watching one more summer end. Yes, the children would no longer be underfoot, but I mourned the lack of freedom that entailed.

But yesterday, I was feeling exempt from that dread. This is not to gloat but to celebrate. To revel in the fact that it’s still summer. Cicadas still sing from the trees. Breezes still waft through the (now-open) windows.

I feel so lucky that the beginning of school no longer signals the end of summer. In fact, the warmth often continues through September and into October. Through no meteorological sleight-of-hand, just a shift in perspective, I’ve gained two more months of my favorite season.

Crabgrass Frontier

Crabgrass Frontier

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Many Americans have grown up in the suburban world created after World War II, our once-vaunted frontier of prairies and mountain peaks reduced to a series of 8o x 100-foot lots with a house and a garage. For decades, home-ownership has been an essential part of the American dream, though it’s become inaccessible for many folks these days.

It’s worth considering, then, that this suburban world did not arrive by accident and there are many other ways to live.

“Nowhere in Europe was there the land, the money, or the tradition for single-family home construction,” writes Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier. Postwar development n Germany, France, Denmark and Spain did not follow this course. Single-family homes are much more of a rarity in Europe.

It was a combination of ample space, low-cost loans and other federal policies that produced American suburbs. And they happened in the blink of an eye.

“By 1961, when President John F. Kennedy proclaimed his New Frontier and challenged Americans to send a man to the moon within the decade, his countrymen had already remade the nation’s metropolitan areas in the short space of sixteen years,” Jackson writes. “From Boston to Los Angeles, vast new subdivisions and virtually new towns sprawled where a generation earlier nature had held sway.”

Such a short time, 16 years, but life in these United States hasn’t been the same since.

Light Show

Light Show

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“Patients report seeing a light show,” the doctor told me yesterday before beginning the first step of cataract surgery, the laser-guided part. He wasn’t wrong. I saw pulsing lights and colors with a bang-up finish like a spectacular fireworks display.

But the real light show is evolving here at home as I get used to a world without cataracts. It’s as if I was living in a dim room, sepia-tinged, and someone just flipped on an overhead light.

Truth to tell, I don’t care for overhead lights. But the real plus here is better vision, especially at night, and that’s the part I’m looking forward to most.

As my right eye gets used to its new lens and my left eye awaits its turn next week, I marvel at the power of science and medicine, which makes miracles happen every day. Yesterday, a miracle happened for me: a light show that keeps on giving.

Super Movers

Super Movers

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It was the most positive health story I’ve read in a long time, discussing a study in the July issue of Neurology which found that people who walk faster than their peers are less likely to experience cognitive decline.

Maybe this makes up for all the crossword puzzles I don’t work, all the chess I don’t play, and all the supplements I don’t take.

The study looked at 5,000 older people and builds on earlier research that studied folks in their 80s who walk at the speed of 50-year-olds. In short,”super movers” age more slowly. They’re healthier and more long-lived.

The article doesn’t discuss the sore muscles and creaky knees that can accompany a faster gait. Are these aches and pains a small price to pay? It depends on how bad one is hurting, I suppose.

But I know where I fall on the issue. I’ll keep walking as fast as I can, for as long as I can.