When’s your off-season?

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Do you have a personal off-season? Can you?

My life here is supported by a resort town. There’s not a single amenity in our “town”, so we head into the actual town 25 minutes away for restaurants, stores, salons, etc. Those businesses all operate on a resort schedule, which is the closest American Industry gets to European. Beginning in late October through early December, hours are reduced and many places close up for a well-earned off-season. And I love every moment of minor inconvenience. Good for you, Siam Thai. Get out of here! No problem, ski shop. You go climb those mountains.

Unfortunately my own sanctioned off-season this time of year probably looks like yours: here are two days off — we know you’re likely spending them negotiating familial relationships, walking on Covid eggshells, trying to recover from years of getting hammered by 40-hr-work-weeks that are actually boundary-less tethers to tiny dinny nightmare sounds coming from your tracking device, all while cooking an actual feast you haven’t practiced in a year — but we hope you come back refreshed on Monday because Carl scheduled that 8am. (Carl thinks we should be back in the office because he’s a sycophant who believes the American Dream is real. Carl doesn’t give a shit what timezone you’re in.)

Corporate jobs don’t have off-seasons. And no, vacation days don’t count, because the point of shutting down the whole business is that there’s not 738 emails waiting to destroy your newly replenished zen when you get back. Which is why I believe in manufacturing your own off-seasons: breaks from fitness, upping the frequency of takeout meals, a pre-determined month of caring less when the house is a mess, a couple weeks’ work of “phoning it in” which I love and have loved since college when I realized it was possible to give a C performance and still get A- life results. And to be clear, despite years of professional work promoting it, I’m not talking about self-care. I am instead talking about self-reallocation-of-care. For me, the perfect off-season isn’t punctuated by massages and elaborate tea routines, it’s just doing a whole lot less of the bullshit and a whole lot more of the best shit.

But what is the best shit?

I have to give my brain a long enough break from the day-to-day to even figure out what a fulfilling day even is. A natural place to start here is to just think about what you’re grateful for. But when I’ve attempted gratitude journals in the past, it gets a little old writing “my legs, Finn, Ben, parents, the outdoors” over and over again. So instead, I like to think about what I regret. After all, when we sit around talking about what we’re grateful for, we’re just dancing around what we regret, or more often, what we’re attempting to not regret, e.g., ignoring your children, spending your life at a desk, never seeing Paris or whatever. Gratitude is a nostalgia-laced reverence, a practice of really nesting in the good things brought into our lives, where regret is that same nostalgia-driven awe, just this time with a big ole complicated layer of “whoops.”

I only have one serious regret — the rest all fall under the categories of “learning experiences” and “well what are ya gonna do.” (I guess the third category is “yes, I absolutely wouldn’t have gone to that restaurant that night” but that’s rewriting history — not choosing a better decision.) My biggest regret is when I had something really good and I let another person convince me it wasn’t. Or, in more explicit terms, I had a popular Tumblr from 2010-2013 that was optioned into a book and instead of converting that audience to a newsletter or different platform and continuing to write for myself, I just let it die because my Worst Boyfriend™ convinced me it (and I) were trash.

I used to resent him for that, but it was my choice. There will always be people who want to influence your decisions — usually not with any malice. But an off-season, a time when I let my brain get a full dose of introspection, allows me to pay closer attention to what’s bringing me real joy and flow immersion. When I can pay attention like this, and burrow into that feeling, I’m not so easily led astray in the woods.

Sort of like moving to this town in the first place.

“Isn’t that kind of far from a hospital?”
“Aren’t you worried about avalanches?”
“Do you even have snow tires?”

I had conviction around this decision. (To be fair, I also didn’t have any manipulative sacs of bitterness in my circle anymore.) Which brings me to the present, an off-season if I ever had one. Living somewhere without endless city entertainments, my job in transition with our budget slashed, friends to see in person at a near all-time low, and only six hours of actual sunshine — there’s not a lot to do but dedicate myself to figuring out what I want to do with myself.

At the tail-end of my last off-season, I and three other women set out to read Designing Your Life together. I was swimming with big ideas and bigger dreams, and I needed to shape the clay of them into something I could use, which is exactly what that book advertised it could help with. For the most part, I really enjoyed that book, but one exercise struck me as particularly futile. It asked for you to write down a thing you love, e.g., “the outdoors” or “making to-do lists”, and then make a word web in all directions under a time limit, and at the end, circle the words you wanted to be a bigger part of your life. I remember thinking this was so dumb. Then earlier this week, I came across all these old papers while unpacking. Here are the words I circled:

• Home decor
• Sharing
• Community
• Inspiration
• Tropical
• Rustic
• Connection
• Stories
• Newsletter

*Gestures around at exactly what I’m doing right now, in a house I themed #tropicabin, sharing my stories and building a little community of people who care via a newsletter.*

Which brings me back to my big regret: abandoning the blog I worked tremendously hard to build. I knew when I was working on that blog that I was fulfilled. Is it ironic to do years of on-and-off soul-searching to come to the same conclusion that you did years ago? This is the plot of countless successful movies, after all. It took me a few years, and a couple very good off-seasons, but here I am, spinning my regret back in the gratitude direction.

So I want to say thank you for supporting this writing endeavor. I don’t wake up each day excited to log in to work, but I do wake up excited to work on this. And I still get questions that make me doubt myself.

“Are you doing it to just practice your writing?”
“Do people actually read it?”
“It seems a little aimless?”

But thanks to the right kind of rest, my conviction is happy to answer: no, yes, so?

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We have to give ourselves off-seasons. It wasn’t that long ago that humans knew a couple hundred people and read the paper and a few books. We have got to give ourselves a break because no one else is going to give it to us. Shut your kitchen down. Shut your social down. Put an out-of-office on your personal email. We need our own permission slips to care less about some things so we can care more about finding and funding and defending the things that light us up.

Here’s my recommendation for a little Sunday journaling in the afternoon sun: Use the past week of stirring up the pot of gratitude to see which regrets are adding that depth of flavor to the stew. Write down all the joy-giving things in your life, from things you do frequently to things you rarely get to do. Then, write down your regrets and what you would do differently. The reality is, we can always start “differently” right now. Be more honest, commit more deeply, love bigger, draw stronger boundaries, and so on. Finally, give yourself a time-constrained off-season. Put it on the calendar. “Do not spend time picking up the house.” Because it doesn’t matter how good your list of loves’n’loathes is if you don’t give your brain the space to figure out how to apply that to your life.

So when I’m re-shaping that ball of clay called life, I try to remember this:

1. Gratitude tells us what we’re getting right
2. Regret tells us what we could get right
3. And rest tells us how

It’s been almost a decade since I was this excited about my own ball of clay. It took one off-season to realize what I had, one to realize what I wanted, and this one to finally pursue it. Thank you being the ones to help me shape it.

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I am filled with intense happiness and gratitude for the life I have been blessed with on this earth. The world may be falling apart in many ways and injustice, cruelty, and hatred are extreme but there is happiness, love, gratitude, and most importantly kindness to be found in extreme measures also. But I’m not really trying to talk about the world. I am want to talk about the happiness I feel in my personal life: my very small, but dear to me, personal life. Though I don’t have a job and it stresses me out and my mind isn’t as healthy as i want it to be, I am getting so much closer to who I want to become and to truly loving and believing in that person. And this time I have been given to heal has been priceless. I am so thankful that I have this chance. I am so grateful for Tim and his support. He has given me so many invaluable gifts. I am thankful for the time to sit and think, think my way out of bad habits and into healthier states of mind. I am grateful for this time to sit and reflect on my life and what I want from it. I am so appreciative of the time to put toward my spiritual side: the greatest cure to my anxiety that I have found (and maybe traveling). I am so thankful that the woods are so accessible to me, that I have the privilege of driving into them in less than an hour, to the sweet escape that is the wilderness. I am so thankful for the friends I hold so dear. I am so grateful for the beautiful, loving, kind relationship that I share with Timothy. I am thankful for our family, our fur family and are human family. I am so blessed. I wanted to materialize this gratitude with words, to put forth the energy and focus on it, to manifests it and pass it on to others. This is a wish for those in the world to feel the blessing that this earth provides and that humans have the capacity to provide. I want this prayer of gratitude to be a reminder to be kind, to take care of one another, and insure that everyone can feel grateful. If we feel more gratitude towards the earth we can treat her with the love and respect she deserves. She has blessed us. I hope this blessing is heard, felt, and passed on. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Blessed be.

pureholistic:

Who are you?
Who cares?
Do we really have to define ourselves?
Sell ourselves?
Everything and nothing, I just am.
I have likes, dislikes and interests but have learnt that this elusive identity isn’t even important for me anymore.
I just am who I am.
And I’m always changing.
I recognise my triggers and patterns and I heal.
I just keep following my energy and overcoming blocks and celebrating triumphs and loving myself unconditionally.
It’s magic.
I’m magic,
You’re magic
And magic can’t be defined

//setting the week’s vibration// with 

visualizations…

I am confident in my body, regardless of my body. 

I have made friendships that will (&should) last. 

my apartment design visions have come to life. 

I found my place in the world.

&gratitudes… 

I am thankful to have a close relationship with my fam. 

I am blessed to have “me” days. 

I am lucky to have found an apartment so easily. 

I am grateful for social media keeping me connected to long distance friends.

[credit:Sara Ottavia Carolei on Pintrest]

Freya Candle Altar Candle

[credit:@winterbornwitches]

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