Last week I found happiness in Marin County, California. I hadn't felt much happiness in the past nine months. I'd been mired in loss of (if not longing for) love, friendship, and even purpose. As a result (or maybe as a cause), I've been the most hermetical I've ever been. I can count my social endeavors with one hand. I can count the dates I've been on with zero hands. It's not as though I was in a desperate state, but perhaps a stagnant repose of ennui. I was an oxymoronic stoic, feeling the numbness, accepting the unacceptable, making motion of the motionless. Such ersatz projection is in itself ersatz to my being. I've always reveled in embracing the unembraceable, but never taking pride if that juxtaposition expensed my ideals and dignity. I am wooed by the curiosity of my opposite if this curiosity results in new ideas, new risks, and therefore new personal growth. Stagnancy, on the other hand, is an existential pause, a lapse in purpose, an ungrounded conduit suspended in air.
A part of me has been lying dormant for some time. While I continued to create, record, and even perform music, bustle the Portland streets on foot and on two wheels, conduct science experiments and make discoveries -- all the activities that construct my being and my purpose -- it was as though I was the experiment in of myself confined within the boundaries of a dream. There was no tangible to anyone or anything. Every day was both deja vu and amnesia where even the loveliest of dreams seemed inane in the raw morning light. But last week this somnolence awoke with vigor, even if just for a moment, suspended in air.
My southern sojourn last week was extemporaneous, if not ill-advised given my current scientific workload; yet, rather ironically, it made sense for those very reasons. I needed a jarring -- a clamorous sonic -- to awaken from my slumber. And so to heed the taunt of hyper-cheap flights, a Presidential holiday weekend (whatever that's supposed to represent), and an offer by someone to rent my apartment for the weekend, I accepted the last-minute challenge to visit my uncle.
My uncle lives in Sausalito, California. It's a small community of mostly wealthy urban expatiates that tolerate the fair-weathered phalanx of San Francisco tourists in exchange for panoramic hill-top views of The Bay and Golden Gate Bridge, as well as a sliver of reclaimed shoreline to display your (certainly not my) yacht with skillful ostentatious neglect. For me, this was a place to invest time with one of my strongest-bonded family members whilst among a sea of beauty. Literally. Like myself, my uncle is also a bachelor either too picky, too selfish, too unlucky, or (and?) too naive to "choose one" to settle into a family. Unlike me, however, he's nearly sixty years young (which worries my own trajectory in search for a family some day, but that's perhaps a topic for another post). Importantly, we both value exploring our world in spontaneity, experiencing its diverse tastes, and staying out until 3:00 AM if that means stepping down one last lonely street in search of one last lonely, albeit charming story. He's also the only other member of my immediate and extended family to pursue a 4-year college degree, let alone a graduate degree. We are both middle-western, middle-class, above-ambitious iconoclasts in search of a new legacy. And so while I didn't grow up close to him, being separated by both distance and a generation, we've become quite the compatriots in our "old" age. We have a lot in common.
A key ingredient in my soup of happiness for this trip was a sadly abandoned beauty-of-a-bicycle left to deflate in the dust. This is a bike owned by my uncle's cousin (I've researched the genealogical nomenclature on this and I've resigned to keep things simple and just call him my "cousin" as well, despite being removed by a generation). This bike is a machine. It's the most beautiful thing I've ridden. Absolutely gorgeous. And "ridden" is something this bike has regretfully not experienced. My cousin has had it for nearly a year and the odometer has nine miles on it. NINE! To make matters more intolerable, he's now in Italy for a year (not so much the middle-class kind of guy). This travesty is akin to a guy dating a supermodel but never...he never...yeah, well, I'll just say I was happy to give that bike what it was made to do; or perhaps better said, what it wants: to be ridden fast and to be ridden hard.
In two days I clocked nearly 100 miles of bliss. And I mean that: bliss. I'm not one for hyperbole. My respect is hard-earned and these rides unequivocally account for the best two days of riding I've ever done. I had successfully escaped the rainiest winter in Portland (that's both figurative and literal) to glide free among sun-baked golden hills, endless blue horizons, short and sweet kisses of fog, punishing hill climbs (yes, I enjoy that), and a cadence of freedom capable of marching through any fearful obstruction. There was one particular moment I recall in lucid detail: I was tracing the cursive font of an 18% grade, one-way coastal decent when I felt every neurotransmitter left in my body surrender its grip. It was a sloppy chemical torrent. My body tingled, my muscles relaxed, my breath whimpered, and a silent existential scream echoed among my mental canyons. I was awakened.
My trip also included saunters through the heights (Twin Peaks) and valleys (Marina District) of San Francisco, carafes of rare wine (the California Wine Merchant), expositions of past and present architecture (de Young Museum), ghostly swims through evaporated pools (Sutro Baths), and erudite lessons of the East Bay (Berkeley). To think I was there for only 4 days makes this all seem exhausting. And now that I think about it, it was. But that's how one wakes up.
Landing back in Portland has been sobering, if not somnolent. I realize the high of my recent endeavor will subside and I'll likely regress back into a slumber, perhaps not as deep as before, but a slumber nonetheless. Ironically, routine is the most tiresome activity of our lives: it's a distraction from who we are and what we strive to be; it's our excuse for sadness when happiness is ours to lose. But routine, as tiresome as it can be, is also our sanity. It's a form of sleep we need no matter how annoying it may be. I can't live the 4 days of my Bay Area trip every day of my life. It's too much. I'd have no neurotransmitters left to control important functions like breathing and thirst. And it's an impossible proposition anyway because its elixir is in the surprises -- the curing power of spontaneity that splashes our consciousness with a cold flush of reality. But too much of that splash causes hypothermia. Thus, if experiences such as mine are to be "waking hours," then it's also necessary to "sleep" in routine. Routine provides time for integration of our waking moments, and for healing and rejuvenation. This is proven neuroscience. Avoiding sleep is deleterious, even fatal. As is eternal sleep. But 1/3 of my time sleeping with the other 2/3 being awake? Now that's healthy living.
