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Sometimes you need the unfamiliar, and sometimes you need the familiar.
My body has craved both at different periods of my life—to the extreme—but the familiar now feels as good as the unfamiliar did.
Last week, I arrived back home to Maryland.
Whether traveling or stationary, finding a rhythm has been paramount for my general wellness, and finding my rhythm back East always seems to take a week or so. Re-entry is jarring. To go from hearing only the sound of your own thoughts to being surrounded by friends, family, and coworkers 24/7 is culture shock. Landing here tends to feel like a crash landing, and then slowly I gain my footing and sink into new ground.
And so begins the process of acclimating, a gradual movement from one life into another.
When I worked a regular 9-5 and commuted to work each day, I established short rituals for the transitions of my day—to cut off work life when arriving home and cut off home life when arriving to work. To literally turn off my phone during lunch. Sometimes prayers were involved.
This is just a greater period of acclimation and requires a little more time to get grounded and establish a routine and rhythm of some sort for your own sanity.
Road life has its own rhythm, of course, and it requires its own set of rituals. You need routine to be efficient, because without efficiency, you’ll be exhausted. When movement and change are the steady thing, getting rooted becomes your responsibility; it’s not something the external world provides. This means getting rooted in yourself. (That said, this time around, working a full-time day job acted as my anchor, something that was sorely lacking during my jaunt in 2019.)
Stationary life is essentially the bedrock of consistency, and routines born here are often tied to the external (places, other people)—to the point that the space in your life can quickly become consumed and pulled in too many directions by obligations and commitments—including the ones you enjoy.
Who sets the structure of your life?
I kept feeling like I just needed time alone to integrate and “collect” myself.
This common phrase is said so often, I’d never given it any thought. What part of “you” has scattered away, and where did it go? What is missing?
How to explain to friends and family who want to see me that all the pieces of me have not dropped in and reformed yet?
After three days stationary (and feeling every sort of dark and depressed a person can feel), I knew what I needed. I needed to take my vitamins, hydrate, get good sleep, eat nourishing foods—all the obvious things.
However counterintuitive, it is the practical things that ground my spirit and ultimately reconnect me to my spiritual life. These little rituals paid attention to, these small gestures of nourishment, take me back to God.
So I kept showing up, kept taking my vitamins and getting to bed early and saying no to meeting up with people and yes to wholesome foods and time with my niece.
And then, as if by magic, I woke one morning and felt OK. I felt like myself. Music sounded good again. I began to feel the spirit in me rise to meet the occasion … to reconnect with all the people I love and take in Maryland in the fall and be here now fully.
✦ A pattern has emerged in these posts. I wade through the chaos until I come out the other side and have made sense of it, and then I write.
✦ I want to return to Destin, Florida, every year (if that weren’t obvious from my last post). Also have to admit, I immediately missed the desert as soon as I got to the Midwest. I am already compiling a list of places to park my van next year, and both are on it.
✦ Frederick roads (!!!!). More lights, more lanes, more cars every time I get here. I swear, I drove on roads in Frederick today that I’ve never even seen before—how can that be?
✦ In some ways, I feel like I’ve been traveling through the underworld for a year.
✦ The scanner in the newsroom is on 24/7, and I find myself catching the oddest snippets throughout the day. Most recently, “There’s a strange guy waving a stick around.”
✦ I’m so into the holiday spirit this year, I’m totally in Christmas mode already. Probably from too many Christmases spent in the desert.
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