What a peculiar day. I don’t believe we’ve ever traveled anywhere else where I only shot one photo all day, but apparently, that’s what I did today. Was it raining earlier? Did we sit somewhere and knit and write in a coffee shop, letting the world go by, not concerned with the photo travel trophies? Without notes or other pictures buffering this image of Caroline walking down this lonely beach, I have no idea where we started, where we ended up, what we ate, or what precisely we did. Kind of nice in some way, only having this one photo of a walk along the shore.

Edit: After writing this, I found a bunch of stuff I was writing on those days in Oregon, and the following was how I spent the morning so it would be certain that Caroline was next to me knitting or reading and that we just chilled the entire day. Here it is:

Preoccupation

The problem with preoccupation is that it saps my ability to broaden my scope of thinking. My greatest time with creativity and having a spectrum of thought that delights me is when I’m fully in the moment.

On this trip to Oregon, I compromised the full relaxation element by focusing too much on a recent hobby I acquired: modular synthesis in the form of Eurorack. I knew going into this ten-day sojourn that I’d be stopping in Portland on the way home to “possibly” buy some new modules; in retrospect, I should have done this right away so I wouldn’t spend the next week configuring my purchases.

The problem with this new endeavor is that it is incredibly expensive, so purchases can not be taken lightly. While there is great resale value in used equipment, even selling the stuff takes precious time away from learning the incredible complexity this embodies. Each component plays a specialized role in music synthesis, so some level of familiarity should be had so the builder of such a system has a fairly good idea of how a new piece will influence the whole.

Realizing that you have fallen into this trap a week after you started a vacation is not a great place to find yourself. If I had it to do over again, I would have spent a week before vacation figuring out and planning which modules I wanted so I could have visited the shop at the beginning of the trip and had them sent home, thus clearing my mind of a million synthesizer thoughts.

This has been so consuming that my dreams have been of wires and knobs. Being obsessive has its moments, especially when planning a business or organizing large projects, but on vacation, it is a burden.

I wonder how this affects us in our daily lives. What happens when we are obsessed with being lonely or without someone close? How does this bring stress into someone’s life when they are worried about job security or learning something new and challenging? Maybe we cannot earn enough money to support the basics, and we fret about the fear of an unexpected expense that can derail us. No wonder then that people turn to substance abuse, be it food or drugs, to combat the uncertainty and preoccupation of things we cannot control.

A small example of clearing the mental deck so I can better enjoy myself and, in turn, my wife can better enjoy her time with me: before leaving for a vacation, I wash all the laundry, pay the bills in advance, arrange for someone to water our plants, clear out food that might spoil in our absence, deep clean our place, fill the gas tank in the car so we have one less thing to worry about when we get back and then finally we can take our vacation and be in the moment.

Being in the moment is an essential key to happiness in my worldview. We know this from our visits to the Whitehouse, rafting the Colorado River for three weeks, or rafting the Alsek in Alaska for half a month. On road trips that have taken us across America, we have been free to enjoy the open landscape of Kansas without worrying if we left the stove on or that we’ll have to go home to dirty dishes and unpaid bills.

Well, then, it would seem to me that we must always be aware of the need to “clear the deck.” A list should be kept at hand that allows us to check off things that might derail our intention of having a great time when we venture out of our routines.