A Decade Examined, Parts 5 & 6
January 17, 2025
It’s been a few minutes—four weeks of them, to be precise—since I wrote Part 4 of this series, in which I review the past ten years as I approach my 70th birthday, only two months from now. Because my birthday is in spring, that season is the start of my year. I’m curious to uncover significant experiences and what they’ve taught me, especially about who I am now and who I want to become. Today I’m examining two years, from spring 2018, when I turned 63, to spring 2020. These are my guiding questions:
What happened? Was there a significant experience or milestone for me? For my family? How did this affect us?
What was the impact of world events on me, my family, and my community?
What did I gain? … lose? … learn?
Did I come upon any place where “two roads diverged” (with a bow to Robert Frost) and what do I think about the one I didn’t take?
In 2018-19 I continued adjusting to my return to ordinary work and projects after the extraordinary year of 2016-17. In my paying job at PEP, I coordinated and assisted the teachers of the parenting classes in Spanish. My volunteer jobs were teaching parenting classes, teaching ESOL classes for Central American immigrants, and leveling up my responsibilities at my church. My personal projects included playing clarinet with my community concert band, taking violin lessons, and learning Spanish, which got a boost when I spent three summer weeks at a school in Antigua Guatemala, working one-on-one with a teacher for six hours a day and living with a local family.
But all that was just the backdrop for the significant milestone of the year. B and I began working with an excellent couples therapist, an experience that shifted my self-perception and set me on a new inward path toward a stronger, more authentic relationship with myself, with others, and with the world. I realized that a relationship doesn’t necessarily follow one of two common paths: perpetually deepening appreciation and love, or complete separation. In relationships, as in life, there are many nuanced options.
Marriage is a promise to disconnect and reconnect with a person so many times that trust is established. It’s the ultimate course in personal growth, not a promise you’ll always be happy. — Dr. Nicole LePera, @ the.holistic.psychologist
My most significant experience of the 2019-20 year was a journey outward. Having spent my whole life in cities, never much interested in the outdoor world, eschewing sports for the arts, and afraid of heights, I decided to spend two weeks backpacking on the Appalachian Trail.
I had made one backpacking trip before this, for three days. That was when my dear son, M, then about 12, was working toward his backpacking merit badge in Boy Scouts. In 2016, right after graduating from university, he thru-hiked the AT in four and a half months. By 2019 he had thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and the Arizona Trail, as well as completing two cross-country bicycle tours. He was my inspiration.
On June 7th, B drove me to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where I started my southbound hike. My goals for the trip did not include maximum suffering. They did include living outdoors for two weeks, with occasional nights in a hiker hostel or a motel.
A few of the things I learned:
I have all the stamina I need. On any trail I’m one of the slowest hikers. My best pace is about 1 mile per hour; give me a mountain to climb or a boulder field to cross and my pace will slow to half that. On the AT my end point each day was one of the lean-to shelters, around 6 to 12 miles apart along this section of the trail. All the shelters are near a water source, and most have a privy and bear-proof storage for food. There were some days that I hiked for 12 hours, taking only a couple of 15-minute breaks, because that’s what I had to do in order to get to my shelter, preferably before dark.
My fellow hikers are fascinating people with life experiences that I never could have dreamed up. Most of them are in their twenties and thirties but I also met several in my age cohort. All of them are friendly and endlessly helpful.
Synchronicity happens often—or maybe it’s just that I notice it on the trail. At a shelter one evening I met a young man, trail named Yogi, who lived in Auckland. My dear son was planning to thru-hike the Te Araroa Trail, which runs north-south through all of New Zealand. Yogi offered to help M get to the start of the trail, a problem he hadn’t yet solved.
I can solve problems creatively, such as when I came upon a large tree blocking the trail (fallen in a storm the previous night). Unable to find a way around it, I made my way over, under, and through it. Bonus: chatting across said tree with a woman approaching from the other side, trail named Buttercup, hiking with her little service dog, Boots. Buttercup gave me my trail name: Bushwhacker.
When I think I don’t have the strength to keep going, my prayer changes to a prayer of surrendering my will and my welfare into care of Love.
Brushing my teeth and taking a wet-wipes bath while camping can feel luxurious.
I finished my hike on Day 14 at Big Meadows Campground in Shenandoah National Park, having covered just under 100 miles of the AT (98.9, to be exact, plus some extra miles when I got a bit lost and had to backtrack).
At Big Meadows Lodge with friends from the trail.
A few of the gratitudes I wrote in my journal:
Hearing the very start of birdsong at about 5:15 a.m., just as I finished my 20-minute meditation.
After spending a night at a motel in Front Royal, walking 45 minutes to find a coffee shop (not McDonald’s), arriving at Happy Creek Coffee & Tea at 7:00, waiting till it opened at 7:30, then getting the best cup of coffee of my life so far—a Mexican bean, made by the pour-over method, with half & half and raw sugar, served in a charming cup and stirred with a steel stirrer.
Finding “trail magic,” a common thing. Someone leaves a cooler filled with water, sodas, and sometimes fresh fruit.
When I arrived at a shelter late one night, the woman who got out of bed around 10 p.m. to help me find the privy, which was on one of several trails going off spokes-like from the shelter.
Getting an unforgettable black-bean burger and strawberry-banana smoothie at a trailside store, after days of reconstituted beans and rice.
