#RSRSeesTheUSA Day 47: Las Vegas, NV & Kanab, UT
Stella was all systems go this morning, which meant no need to visit the Las Vegas Subaru service center.
I decided to sit and read in a coffee shop before heading out of Nevada and on to Utah (via Arizona and then Utah and then Arizona again, because that’s how the highways go… trippy when Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Saving Time, so the clock keeps changing on you as you drive on through).
My arbitrary decision to stop to sit and read became a real pleasure that I want to hold onto. I sat down to eat and sip at my coffee, and a pair of women nearby struck up a conversation that started with a compliment on my bag and turned into a conversation about books and travel and adventure and graduate school. Another solo coffee shop visitor joined us in the middle and added a fourth book-loving voice to the mix. We talked about re-starting careers and trying to find our ways back to something like a normal life and how our attention spans are all muddled. We talked about the navel-gazery of academia and the challenge of getting good bagels outside of New York City and how fascinating Mary Wollstonecraft was. We raved about favorite authors and praised the value of mixing high and low brow pleasures. I sat in that coffee shop for about an hour and a half before leaving to get on the road, and it left my heart happy.
One of the last things one of my conversation buddies said to me before I left was that I give off a warm spirit of adventure and energy. This is probably one of the nicest things she could have said to me, and it reminded me of a passage in Madeleine Dore’s I Didn’t Do the Thing Today, which I just finished.
There are times when our life is open. We let in more interactions, make more connections, go more places. At other times we have a more closed life, where we deepen those connections, even if it’s just our connection with ourself. We need to find ways to be kind to ourselves as well as others, after all, and perhaps this starts with how we connect to our own self and our own thoughts.
The thing about our doing-obsessed society is that it can cause us to be so hard on ourselves. We ruminate on the fact that we didn’t do the thing today, or we didn’t do enough, or we aren’t good enough. We think that to be better, we need to make some drastic life change, but perhaps we simply need to be a bit kinder to ourselves and allow for the moment we are in. When we are present in this way with ourselves, people can sense it and are drawn to it without us necessarily doing a thing. As the writer Caitlin Moran put it, Just resolve to shine, constantly and steadily like a warm lamp in the corner, and people will want to move towards you in order to feel happy.
I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve felt shiny like that, and I’ve been focusing a whole lot of energy over the last couple years on trying to be kinder to and more connected with myself. It was nice to hear from a stranger that perhaps that’s communicating itself.
Cloud of the day: this dramatic, dark-and-handsome, gray, fluffy blanket that accompanied me (with only periodic rain) from Nevada into the dramatic desert rock formations of Arizona and Utah
