You plan months ahead to make it work. Line up sitters, meal plan for the following week, organize an overnight weekend at Grandma’s house. It feels luxurious, the silence and the resting in words. “Thinking is work.” You read it on a bumper sticker weeks ago and it remained with you, rolling over in your mind. You wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to your computer. Thinking is work but it’s not valued, not reimbursed in our quantifiable, time card, excel spreadsheet world.
So you plan. You prepare excessively just so you can have the time, the space to think. You kiss your babies goodbye, leave them with Costco lasagnas and Daddy’s breakfast-for-dinner. You drive to the ferry terminal, eat clam chowder, thick with cream, chewy and loaded with immersed oyster crackers punctuating each bite. You cross to the peninsula, familiar from childhood jaunts with your family: damp woods to explore, saline air stinging nostrils, small town diners with stiff grilled cheese hugging cups of tomato soup.
In the dark it’s a struggle. You find the communal house on the old military fort, now converted into housing for writing retreats, community events. Odd to think these dusty buildings used to be barracks. You came here for your medical school orientation weekend, sleeping bags tucked under arms, eyeing strangers with anticipatory reluctance, a peculiar Junior High start to the four years of forming physicians into being. You also came here for medical residency retreats. Each spring you’d all gather, let loose in the way a group working 36 hour days, 100 hour weeks, caring for the critically ill must.
The drafty house smells familiar, like ghosts of orientations past reside. Here are strangers, unbonded to you, a writerly community. All introverts, you’re bound by the thinking, the thinking is work. You write and you read. You walk and you sit. The seaside air suffuses your mottled skin, still tensile but hinting at fine lines and transition into middle age. You can think here. You can create. It’s work, but it’s inspired. And those other selves, those other lifetimes, those other beings of retreats past dance on the floorboards, float through the drafty air, haunt the tap-tapping as letters form into words creating sentences giving meaning to the empty page.
