Listening To The Quiet
Last week my family and I went off the grid, on purpose. We rented a house in northern Wisconsin miles away from everyone. In fact, there were whole days when we saw no one besides each other.
It may seem odd to distance ourselves so much from other people after 18 months of doing much the same at home but this was different. We weren't trying to manage our regular lives from a distance, we were putting our regular lives at a distance. We intentionally unplugged, literally for the most part. We spend hours kayaking, reading, cooking, sleeping, hiking, watching the birds (including bald eagles), hammocking, and letting our little pup live his best life.
It was a wholly different experience than working and living virtually as we have been. We enjoyed long, leisurely mornings drinking coffee and watching the river flow slowly past, and in that quiet, something amazing happened. We let our minds go and new ideas came our way. I wrote more in my journal last week than in the previous month. The peace allowed room to breathe, to think, to listen. I listened for my next steps. I listened to my intuition. I listened to what my body needed. Sometimes it needed to paddle hard upstream and other times it needed to lie in a hammock and watch the sky.
We liked the solitude of the area so much that we looked at buying property up there for a retreat center. No purchases have been made but if in 10 years you're attending a retreat at a facility I own, you heard it here first.
So why, with so many places opening up for travel, would we head to a place where we could go days without seeing other people? There were two reasons. The first is that I booked this trip in April when we didn't really know what the summer would look like COVID-wise or whether our child would be able to be vaccinated beforehand (no longer an issue). The second is that we take the vacations that we need at the time. My family was in need of rest and space this summer. The last real vacation we took before the pandemic was heavily city-based in the Pacific Northwest and we tend to alternate city and country/wilderness vacations. It was time for more birds and trees than people.
By listening to ourselves and what we needed, we allowed ourselves to truly hear. We could really hear one another and each of us was able to reset ourselves for the year ahead. Our daughter starts school again soon, my husband is at the beginning of a huge venture that has never been tried before, and I am in charge of the direction of my whole company. Now more than ever we need to listen and trust ourselves and one another in big ways and small. The quiet and the space gave us what we needed.
What do you need? How do you take the time to listen to yourself?
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