Category: Solitude

Loving Yourself

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A friend of mine is having a bit of a rough time right now and I sent her a note to check in.

How’s it going, how are you feeling?

One of the ways we exist for each other is to confirm and mirror experience. When we notice a friend or a colleague struggling, we can say empathetically, “this looks hard.”

Sometimes kindness comes in the noticing.

Sometimes just acknowledging where you are can be enough to let yourself say, “Wait, yes, this is exhausting.”

But what happens when you’re weary, sad, or pushing through something insanely difficult and you need to take care of yourself throughout the process?

What if it feels like you can’t lean on everyone else and you need to muster up energy to support yourself?

My friend wrote back:

What small self-care steps would you recommend for feeling: frazzled, overwhelmed, frustrated with family, anxious about getting work done, sad, tired, homesick, confused and turned around?

Sometimes a few self-care motions can make all the difference in the midst of the yuck.

And as hard as it can be to do, as impossible as it can seem, we need to love ourselves.

Love yourself tenderly in the hard moments, like you would a child.

Now is not always the time to beat yourself up, or scold yourself to work harder or just “suck it up.” Sometimes you are already doing all of that — and we need, instead, to extend ourselves compassion.

We have a responsibility to love ourselves, no matter how much we might long to outsource this responsibility. In fact, if we look a bit deeper, we might find and sense that we are made up of love in our atoms and or cells — although in times of pain that can seem faraway, inaccessible.

So what we do is we care for ourselves, tenderly.

For me, as an INFJ, I need plenty of alone time, time away from stimulation, and time to decompress. Time and space to hear my own thoughts.

Travel is noisy and busy and full of other people’s energies. I am a fairly energetically open and receiving person (INFJ will do that to you) and that makes me exhausted being around other people.

My coping and compensation mechanisms are to find really quiet, really still things. I often have to activate them; it’s not enough to just “go be quiet in a room.”

I have to create environments that calm the buzz and the chatter. Dark, white-noise bars do it. Water and saunas and warm baths do it for me. Swimming helps.

These are a few things that help:

  • Alone time. Even if it’s in a bar, around other people. I take myself out to nice meals by myself and read a book. It’s something that feels really ME. For some reason Sushi and Sake at a small corner table do it for me (although not while I’m pregnant right now!).
  • Get someone to touch you. Hugs are needed, and our consumer culture can facilitate this through…
  • Getting your nails done. Particularly a pedicure. It’s a relief to have someone touch your feet. Soak them in warm water. You might want to cry. There’s a thing about Jesus washing people’s feet and I love that story (regardless of religion) because it’s so humbling and kind. Be kind to yourself.
  • Get a $20-$30 Thai massage. There are usually lots of places where you can pop in and get a massage. Get it. It helps with your body and rhythm and restoration.
  • Yoga class or 5 minutes of yoga. Pay attention to how much you may think you don’t want to go and understand that this might be a form of resistance to letting go, giving in.
  • Take a “dark nap.” I like doing “dark naps” in the middle of the day — shutter the curtains, hide in a closet, put earplugs in and an eye mask and do a sensory deprivation. It’s good for the soul, lets you close down to the sounds and noise around you.
  • Wrap yourself into a ball and give yourself a hug. 
  • Massage your temples, scratch your head.
  • Journal it out.
  • Listen to soothing music. 

And for sadness:

  • Sometimes reading really sad things or watching movies that will make me cry (Shawshank Redemption!) actually helps. It’s like you have to move through and with the sadness, not hold it at bay.
  • Crying is therapeutic. It helps clean out our immune systems and re-set our cells (it’s not just a passing idea that it’s useful, it really does do good things for our bodies).

What do you do to take care of yourself?

What practices help you restore, rejuvenate, and work through darker days, sadness, or frustration?

John Stilgoe on the Magic Outdoors: Get Outside!

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Why is walking and wandering through the physical world so important?

While the architecture of the digital world is equally fascinating–we’re all increasingly inhabiting spaces that don’t have correlating spatial and locational constraints, and the architectural design of online communities, internet spaces, and experiences is an art in an of itself,–there is a beauty and magic to exploring the physical world.

Embedded within the world around us are clues and pieces of magic that tell us how it was formed, where it came from, and what the layered stories of space are. We inhabit the spaces built by generations, and I often think in my city wanderings that walking through an old city is like walking through a collection of brains from times’ past. The best of invention (or communication or understanding) turn into creation, and those creations tell us a story about the discoveries that happened. Tall buildings rose when elevator shafts were made possible and concrete, rebar, and steel upended the limitations to how many bricks we could pile atop each other. Better air quality mechanisms and water infrastructure (particularly the removal of thousands of pounds of liquid shit, made by humans), allowed us to put more humans into smaller spaces without the same adverse repercussions. The invention of air conditioning is credited with unlocking the southern states and making them habitable for “real” industry and office work in the middle of the 20th century. Continue reading “John Stilgoe on the Magic Outdoors: Get Outside!”

The “Working Vacation” or How I Briefly Escape From Insanity

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I’m on a slow retreat, one in which I escape–although not completely–from the working world. I’m taking a long weekend in Catalina, off the coast of southern California, to spend time with my family, catch up on writing, and slow down on the work-crazy that sometimes takes hold. (Okay, fine, it takes hold all the time.) I’m grateful, excited, and so joyful to be pausing for a minute to let my writing, reading, and exercise dreams expand to fill the day in its entirety. I am thankful that I can do this… in fact: I really could get used to this… 

What is a working vacation? Sounds miserable, you might think. I’ll try to explain…

A working vacation

This morning, I got a note from a colleague, for whom I’m working on a presentation outline. I sent her a brief note that I’d be delayed in my presentation outline, asking if she would mind if I got it to her next week–and I confided that I was taking a working retreat to vacation and regroup, and to spend some time writing and observing. I worried for a bit that she would be upset by my lack of work ethic, by my missing the deadline–all worries I made up in my mind, naturally. Yet instead, she wrote back:

“Enjoy the space between work and leisure–it is a great place to work on big ideas. I’m looking forward to seeing yours.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s not about not working, per se, but taking myself out of context of everyday work, back and forth, to explore, dream, reflect, and think big. It’s when I play big, a phrase that Tara Mohr talks about, which I LOVE. It’s when I have the AH-HA! moments on the top of the mountain, when I shake off the insecurities and the banalities, when the frivolities of life ungrip themselves from my psyche, when I find that I’m no longer scurrying around in a HUGE FAT HURRY, cracked out on adrenaline and worried about getting everything done. In it, I realize that, YES, YES, I want to be working on these things, YES, what I’m doing is fun, and wow–my job is cool. More than that: what I dream of, create in my own space–these are projects worth pursuing.

Taking time off is so important as part of my process that I’m certain I wouldn’t be capable of the work that I do without regular, intermittent breaks. I’ve written about how the strict 9-5 doesn’t make sense to me, and I still agree: you need to work in the way conducive to greatness, not in a way prescribed by archaic remnants of past industrial societies.

I confess, too, that I sometimes hate posting the routine pictures on social networks of the “vacation,” where I look like I’m doing nothing all day, because it doesn’t capture, for me, what a working vacation really is. I’m as guilty as the rest of us (Oh, how I love photographs and pinning things on pinterest!) But I digress. I vacation. I retreat. 

It’s about big ideas. It’s about balancing movement and reflection with learning, consumption, and creation. And here on the island, scribbling in my notebooks, I wrote this in a long-form message to one of my friends: “I like to ‘fill up’ from inputs  such as reading, people, learning, studying, and then LOVE taking time to process, reflect, and percolate… mostly outside, in this crazy-beautiful world we get to live in.”

Because it is crazy-beautiful. We shouldn’t miss it with our heads down, cramming behind desks, adrenaline surging from the latest reprimand or arbitrary deadline.

No. It’s not about this.

It’s about taking time to live the balance that I crave, and really put into practice, now, the ability to be flexible, to work from anywhere, to change it up, to produce, create, and enjoy. To create moments of wonder and awe, and balance and love. To live.

How to take a working vacation

A working vacation, my definition: Taking a leave of absence from your current life and packing only the components that you want to bring, in order to be productive, inspired, relaxed, and restored.

Here are some rough notes about a working vacation–what I do, and why it works for me.

Leave your current context. Find somewhere new to go and set up shop. Go somewhere new. Some weekends in San Francisco, I’ll take a “writing vacation” and unplug from the internet, hole up in a favorite coffeeshop with my laptop, and work three back-to-back four-hour stints and just read, write, and write. The last time I did this, I wrote more than 15,000 words in a weekend. Exhausting? Yes. Exhiliarating? Completely.

Spend more than half the day away from the screen. For the better part of ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY, computers and sitting have not been a part of it. The greatest thing about vacation is that the computer seems less important, less toxic and controlling. Somehow, in the sounds of the rolling ocean and the vistas on the mountains behind me, the computer seems somewhat small and unimportant. I can’t help but get up and move around throughout the day. In an office, my patterns and habits become ingrained, and I forget that 10+ hours a day at a desk is not healthy or sane.

Find things to say No to. I’m on vacation from my full-time job–yes, vacation hours were used–and I told my colleagues I’d be in email contact for a few hours a day, but put up a vacation responder to remind folks that I’d be mostly out of touch. My personal rule? No more than 2 hours of work-related tasks per day. When you’re in the middle of coordinating big projects and deadlines, and pushing ideas forward, it can be hard to leave and carve out time for other projects. Sometimes it seems impossible. For me, the most important thing is leaving my desk behind and being clear on communication with my team that I’ll start back up again when I return next week.

Okay, so you should also plan a little in advance. It’s helpful for me to plan in advance (cue: when responding to people and coordinating life and projects, include a line that says, “I’ll be out of touch until Monday, but I can get back to you next week”). When saying No to things, I cue people in to when I’ll be available so I don’t leave projects or teams hanging.

Pack only what you really want to bring. This is critical. Leave the crap behind. Go on a vacation from obligation. Leave your unfound worries at home. Shirk some of your responsibilities, if you can. I said “No” to several projects and put them on hiatus to make space for other projects to have the full attention of my day. Often, I get so buried in the menial tasks related to organizing things and people, that I forget to carve out time for idea generation and creation. I set up an auto-repsonder on my main email accounts related to work and duties, and said no to bringing obsessive email with me. Instead, I packed 7 books I want to enjoy reading by the oceanside, a notebook with outlines for book ideas I have, a list of essays I’m working on, and two binders with my current projects that I want to catch up on.

Set goals. I love small time frames with clear goals. Even some weekends “Have no goals, except enjoy yourself!” This weekend, there are three big projects that I’m working on that I need to make space for, and have been impossible to finish in the wee hours of the night when I get home from my full-time job. Design projects; writing ideals; unfinished essays. When I started this long weekend, I set a project goal for each day, outlining the three major milestones I want to accomplish while here. Will I go on long bike rides? Absolutely. Jump in the ocean? (Um, have you met me?) Will I spend an hour in the jacuzzi bouncing ideas around late at night with my family? Of course. This is all part of it. And for several hours in the mornings and again post-dinner, I’ll be tackling these big projects because I want to. And I can.

Move. I have a personal head-over-heels relationship with fitness, movement, dancing, prancing, swimming, running, and all things movement. I think our bodies are marvelous, wonderful things, and the greatest sin of our lives is to waste them away by sitting behind screens. Vacations should be rejuvenating to the mind, soul, and BODY. Get out for a slow hike, a walk, a stretch, a paddle, a jog. My dad calls his running “happy trotting,” — this is your happy pace. Your place where it’s comfortable and fun, and where you walk when you want to walk and stop when you want to stop. But by all means, move.

But don’t take my word for it–Richard Branson says the most important thing he’s done for all of his productivity and success is to work out every day. Countless articles on fitness and health say that moving, walking, standing, stretching and meditation are world-changing for your productivity, success, and long-term health. One of my favorite outdoor fitness programs in San Francisco talks about why movement is important for life: “When people start to move around with others every day, they start to get a sense of what they’re capable of and what they’re built for.” Yes.

Make a dedication. On this island, the sun rises in the east over the Pacific, a luxury not experienced on the mainland of the States. When I wake up in the morning, I walk outside and greet the sun and the day, sleepy-eyed, in my pajamas, and I make a dedication to myself, to this process, to the projects, and remember how grateful I am to be doing all that I am doing. It involves a big stretch, some toe-touches, and a happy smile, among other things. This weekend, I’m dedicating to observing, watching, and rejuvenating my creative spirit by balancing playfulness with ample time for creation.

On a personal note, my goal is to write at least 1000 words every day in March, mostly short stories and explorations. I’ve been remiss in writing lately and it affects everything else I do. Or, as this excellent NPR article covered earlier this week–what you’re holding in your unconscious brain is actually killing you. Let it out. Take this as a cue that writing soothes and restores your soul and keeps you healthy. It’s not a hobby. It’s a necessity.

Hopefully these notes help you. Sometimes a weekend away, a day off, is really what your soul needs. Listen.

End note: Don’t miss out, or When I give in, I lose. 

I’ll close with a short story that crossed my mind while climbing up a hill earlier today on a big bike–a two hour hill that challenged my leg strength quite a bit. It was 3 PM in the afternoon, and I was a bit weary of reading and writing, and the lazy slump of post-afternoon stress started to inhabit my mind. I hadn’t worked out that well in a few days and my cells were starting to feel sluggish, lazy, full and fat with unused glucose molecules. I looked at the couch. I could just sit here for a while… I thought to myself. I had told Carol that I’d go on a big bike ride with her in the afternoon. My mind said, you know, you could just do it tomorrow.

But I knew, somehow, that I had wanted to do the ride, and that I would still like to do it. But getting over the sluggish me is not easy.

I should go, I thought reluctantly. Carol quipped: Stop thinking! Let’s just go! So I put on my helmet and we started up the hill. Yes, it was hard. And then, within thirty minutes, we pulled around the corner of the first hill and I saw this:

I grinned. I realized that I had, once again, almost canceled on a beautiful ride because I was afraid of a little hard work. We continued up the hill. How could I have missed this? Skipping out on a little hard work–a tough hour on the bike, pedalling, something which we are all capable of, and missing out on the views, fresh air, sunshine, and satisfaction? My brain is crazy! She is crazy, I tell you! And I realized:

In general, if I talk myself out of doing something, I like myself a little bit less.

Every time I concede to the monkey brain, I lose.
My brain is wired to keep me safe, to protect me from danger, to want to fit in with the crowd. It wants me to keep me from hard things. I have to fight this.
Because doing things, exploring, creating–this is life’s meaning.
Living with others, loving, having meaningful relationships. This is it.

So fuck the monkey brain. Do it anyways. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about all the time.
There’s a lot waiting for you if you’ll let go of the nerves, reluctance and fear.
And if you skip out on an opportunity, you lose.  

If I listened to it unwaveringly, I would miss out on so many opportunities for wonder, growth, and exploration.

To live is to work, and to love.

Paraphrasing the distinguished quantum physicist, Freeman Dyson, in an article from the Economist:

“To be healthy means to love and to work. Both activities are good for the soul, and one of them also helps to pay for the groceries.”

Yes.

Swimming Taught Me This: Early Morning Reflections

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I’ve taken a four-month break from swimming; launching a project, traveling, and other interests have put my swimming adventures on the back burner recently. For several reasons: A) I’m not super-human, and therefore, B) I can’t do everything at once. Yet I’m getting the itch, again, and feeling the need to be swimming. The glorious (albeit strange) sunny mornings in the Bay have me standing at the waters’ edge, wishing I were back in the ocean, navigating the waves. And it’s apparent in my writings: I’m writing, dreaming, imagining, planning about swimming. Here’s a story I wrote about a race last summer, and what I was thinking about before driving to the start line. 

Also, if you’re in San Francisco next week, I’ll be giving a talk about endurance swimming and telling the story of the 9 mile prison-to-prison swim on Thursday, February 16th, 7 PM along with five other endurance athletes. Come join! 

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The morning of the race, I drive slowly through the foggy air on the 101 highway, meandering my small hatchback Toyota Matrix along the winding highways and through the tunnel. The golden gate bridge arches gracefully, simply, silently across the mountainous opening to the vast terrain of the flat Bay waters. To the east, the sun still hides beyond the tangent of the earth’s curved surface, darkness enveloping the city. The black water sprawls out eastward, north, and south, tendrils circling around bay towns, creating a flat plane of water connecting and separating each of the communities in the area.

The drive across the bridge in my car is same rhythm; a sweep under the poised arches, the swoop from the long linear cables supporting the vast planes of concrete. Despite crossing the bridge back and forth most every day of my San Francisco life, I still marvel at the towers with each crossing. Like a patron at a church, I bow gracefully in my mind to the relics of humanity; to the strength and impressiveness of architecture and engineering. Together, we built this. We created this. Somewhere in our collective history, we did something together to build, piece by piece, the metal structures and spans that stand, today, as the icon of the city and gateway to the bay area.

My car, my mechanical lump of plastic and steel, zooms quickly across the bridge, hugging tightly against the center lane. The bridge is divided split down the middle, barely a drop of traffic this early in the morning. At certain times of the day, the bridge lanes change direction in response to the disproportionate volumes of traffic headed in and out of the city. Small round holes with 2’ high yellow pegs indicate the lane change, a single white line separating the two lanes of high speed traffic. Why there are not more head-on collisions is beyond me.

The beauty of the bridge, in my mind, is tempered by the sadness of the deaths associated with it. Each year, 40-odd individuals stand at the height of the towers, looking out from the rust red metal railings, and stare into the open air. At over 300 feet high, in the center of the small opening to the bay, wind whips around the bridges’ struts, a sense of extreme brevity and tenuousness alighting any lone soul on the bridge. Loneliness, emptiness, and fatigue with life are exacerbated by the conditions at hand: extreme distance, crisp air quality, a stunning visual 360-degree view of the entire Bay’s waters and the history embedded in the waterfront shorelines. San Francisco, home to the gold rush, to the container ships from China, to a massive amount of trade; the heart of the northern California area. In the center of the Bay, Angel Island; south of that, Alcatraz. Below and above the bridge, fog runs in and out, slowly engulfing the bridge and releasing it in a temperamental dance.

But my mind flickers to the dark side of the bridge; the stories untold and unreported by the media. Despite the beauty, despite its grace, the bridge offers a sinister promise to humanity. The ideal of death, the promise of ending, the temptation of suicide flashes into the minds of those haunted by their own psychology, plagued by the torturous thoughts that inhabit their psyche.

And, slowly, people step up the rails, arch their arms, lean forward, and drop with the heavy weight of gravity to the watery world below, ending their brief and seemingly inconsequential reign on this planet. That people can get to this place, the darkness of isolation, the sadness of mental confusion – this flashes through my head as I drive. Every day, I pay homage both to the brilliant architects and engineers, and to the lost people who didn’t make it to their next day, for reasons unknown fully beyond even their own mental capacity. And yet, I understand them both. I am them both. We are all here, together, and sadness – it is not a unique condition. I feel it when I swim, I escape from it when I run, I hear it when I play, I taste it when I breathe. I know. Deeply, intuitively, living it – I know the depth of darkness and sadness, and I feel the lone harmonicas and haunting harps play when the mind starts to bend in maladaptive ways to become our own worst enemy, to work against ourselves by worrying, by thinking, by being.

And swimming, swimming, swimming – the beautiful sport of being by yourself, the act of understanding how your mind plays with your body, and how your body can overcome your mind, and how you can move beyond something by steadily practicing it each day, bending your physical and mental capabilities into new territories – it is a marvel to me. My mind is a joy, my being an art, my ability to negotiate the two terrains a brilliance I try to dumbfoundedly enjoy. Swimming taught me this, I know it. I feel it. I reach my arms out and pull invisibly, feeling the weight of the air and the lightness of the world, knowing that this practice has somehow made me able to see this. The good side. The beauty in it all.

I love swimming. 

We all need white space.

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

White space, in graphic design, is the space on the page that isn’t.

It’s the space on the page that’s blank, that echos the thoughts and points of the content by giving it space.

White space is that delicious break, that rest, the recapitulation of ideas by doing nothing at all.

White space gives the words meaning and play, letting light, color, balance, shadow, and emphasis dance across the page in new ways.

I love white space.

Sometimes, in my designs, my boss calls me a minimalist.

I find this funny that my writing is so abundant and my designs so crisp and precise.

White space, in our lives, is the buffer of time we give to ourselves between projects.

Unplanned weekends are white space.

Three hours between the end of work and the next task – that’s white space.

Planning only one activity – perhaps yoga- and then being open to the activities beyond – is white space.

White space is play.

It’s space to breathe.
It’s space to be.

White space gives definition to our activities by forcing us to be more selective, not to cram, and to CHOOSE.
Above all else, choose what fits on your page and what is eliminated.

Beautiful uses of white space come from copious amounts of editing, revision, and re-drawing. Words don’t always land perfectly on a page the first time. Trial and error is good.

Different days and tasks and chores require different amounts of white space.

But we all need white space. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

White space makes the other stuff matter more.

White space make your life activities better.

White space makes you better.