Dark Water

In a blog I wrote in 2023, I listed a bunch of bullets on how to “unfuck” you life… one of which was “Accept That You’re Going to Die, Allocate Your Time Wisely.” I would be remiss if I didn’t also preface this with the fact that I struggle a lot with this.

I spend a great deal of my time not in the present… fantasizing of the next adventure or achievement, or romanticizing the past disguised as nostalgia or sentimentalism. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; goal setting keeps us evolving as people and being nostalgic can make one feel satisfied of the journey we’ve taken. When we have a propensity for living too far in the future or far back in the past… it takes away from our present, which the PRESENT is the only thing we are guaranteed to have. This life is all temporary.

The Rust that Undermines the Structure

Although being nostalgic definitely brings goodness to my life, I often times feel that if I stay too long in the past the goodness begins to spoil. It makes me weepy and depressed… opening the nostalgic door invites grief to the party sometimes when it wasn’t invited.

I read somewhere once that those who are depressed are stuck in the past and those who are anxious are stuck in the future. I mean… that makes sense… but of course both of these are far more complex to just lump them into two simple states of mind.

In Andrew Solomon’s book, “The Noonday Demon,” he states that depression can only be explained in metaphors, in which he so poignantly explains depression as the rust that undermines the structure of the soul. I always connected so strongly with this analogy… feeling that my sorrow always undermine the goodness my life has.

By far, one of the hardest things about working remote is the fact that I get significantly less social interaction as I did when I was in the office, pre-pandemic. As of today, I haven’t been in the office since March of 2020… my life has NEVER been the same since that date. I can’t fathom that it has been almost FOUR years… and when I think of the fact that it’s been that many trips around the sun I start to have a panic attack about how quickly time is going by.

I get restless a lot. When I’m stuck in the same house I wake up to every morning, sitting at the same desk every day, encountering the same problems at work that I have for over a decade in my field… the whole house starts to become suffocating. I find myself at night, plotting trips I’ll never take, or building out the latest and greatest overland vehicle there is… only for me to have no where to go because Texas has no public lands.

Isn’t that ironic… Texas touts itself as the freest state in the union, yet I can go climb a mountain in my backyard in California. I have the coolest overland rigs ever, and every camp gadget you can dream of, but I’m stuck.

I’ve been told that it’s a symptom of being a lifelong workaholic; when you get any amount of idle time, you feel anxious because you aren’t being productive. Not being productive decreases your value and wastes your life. The cycle repeats itself.

But on some occasions I am able to get away for even the briefest of moments. Last week, I decided to take a trip to Bolivar and brought my dog with me. Unfortunately, I took too long to get out there and set up our tent, and the dark ominous waters scared me too much to camp out there alone with my dog.

I get really scared to be out in the open in the dark. I remember one time I took someone out to the desert once to go star gazing at night, and just the thought of being in the wide open desert, miles and miles and miles away from any other human (that I know of) scared the hell out of me. I spent most of the time with my back pressed up against the truck bed… So it comes to no surprise that standing out on the isolated beach in Bolivar scares the crap out of me too.

For a while, I couldn’t quite figure out why the dark waters intimidated me. I thought maybe it’s the fear of not being able to see. Maybe it’s because I feel like it’s this thing that’s so much bigger than I can conceive and I am just so small. To feel feeble with time. To rust away.

But I tell myself that it’s a blessing to grow old, as not everyone is given that chance. The anxiety stems from the fact that I know that the longer I live, the more pain I will eventually experience. I often times wonder how my grandma, who is well in her 80’s, faces it so bravely. It’s perhaps because she is a woman of strong Catholic faith… I wish I felt that way too. I think existence and grief, would be so much easier to tame instead of feeling like I am constantly being chased by a tiger.

The dark waters remind me of both. Will it creep up on me while I sleep and take me? I find myself afraid to turn my back to the ocean at night like I’m afraid of the vastness of the space around me.

So anyways… here’s a recipe for Dutch Oven Lasagna…