Put this in the category of Problems Everyone Should Have. One day, you find yourself with enough time, money, permission, and inclination to fulfill a dream… and you have no idea what to do. Solving all your problems has a tendency to dispel that level of tension that used to generate so many plans and fantasies. “Travel to Europe” has been on my bucket list since I was 10 years old. Suddenly, it’s time to get specific. What to do? What to do? We start with two constraints: the timeline and the starting point. There is a trade show in a particular city. When the show is over, we have two weeks to play. Where should we go? I order a European travel guide (using Powell’s store credit) and wait impatiently for it to arrive. We start by considering the country that is hosting the trade show. We quickly decide that, while we very much want to explore this place, we want to do it in summertime, when we can hike, camp, and sleep in our three-season tent. We’re not ruling it out; we’re setting aside a rough mental sketch of a different potential future trip. This leads to the easy decision to choose a place that will be warm at this particular time of year. We are sissies about this. We live south of every city in Europe, plus most of Asia and North America. We live in perpetual summer. We can expect that if we want to go anywhere, it will probably rain a lot, but surely no more than necessary? We are also tightwads, and we prefer the known quantity of our tent (the Hotel Denham) to the unknown quantities of hostels and hotels. My experience of a trip revolves entirely around the choice of mattress. I have a major parasomnia disorder, and it doesn’t take much to throw my sleep schedule into chaos. Within a few days, I’ll be a walking trainwreck of exhaustion, headaches, leg spasms, irritability, and distraction. That’s if we’re lucky and I don’t wind up standing in the middle of the bed, unconsciously slapping myself and screaming. In other words, it’s better for everyone if I take care of myself. That means either a comfortable mattress with a deep pillow top, or my familiar sleeping bag on top of my familiar air mattress. No point taking halfway measures, sharing a room with strangers or sleeping on a two-star monstrosity. (Mattrosity?) Other people will find that the make-or-break factor of a good trip is access to special food, medication, high-end walking shoes, contact with at-home family, or something else that is highly personal. For me, it’s sleep, and it would be irresponsible for me to plan otherwise. We hit a speed bump when I become curious about a particular country and start looking closely at the rail map, only to find that my honey doesn’t really want to go there. We are mutually surprised that we didn’t both instantly hit on the same idea, the way that we did with Iceland. (We were on our honeymoon in Victoria, BC, talking about where to go next, and we were both like, DUH, ICELAND!). Then I decide, in a classic case of sour grapes, that my language skills for the vetoed country aren’t very strong anyway. Might as well save that place for a different year as well. We agree on the obvious, which is the place we were most recently considering for a vacation. The trip we intend(ed) to take requires five weeks to do it properly. For several reasons, this is not the year for that trip. There were other regions we knew we would miss on the five-week version. Why not do one or more of those on this trip? This sounds like a plan, and I order a more specific travel guide for this country (using a gift card). Next, we decide on transport. We’re flying in separately, since there is no point having me hang around the hotel room during the trade show while expensively boarding our animals for the extra days. We’ll fly back together. We’ll take the train to our destination country. That part of the trip is a hazy cloud of intention, lacking shape or detail, so we choose an exit city and plan a day to get there. We book plane tickets. Now we know we’re arriving in one city and leaving from another that is hundreds of miles away. I read the section in the all-Europe guide about our intended country, and make note of all the top-scored cities. Might as well start there. The guidebook suggests a range of days for each city, from one to three. We tend to agree. After I start sketching in the finer details of the trip, it emerges that the guidebook does not cover one of the country’s major cities. I have to Google to find out why. Although it looks like an obvious point on the rail map, the high-speed rail bypasses it. We can still get there quite easily; we’ll just have to do our own independent research (or consult a different brand of guidebook) to find out what to see. I have a Pinboard of this country from last year. I go through it and locate all the beautiful pictures on the national map. It transpires that almost everything I picked is in the wrong part of the country. We are now up to at least three completely distinct iterations of fabulous dream vacations in this country. An embarrassment of riches. I read that people often return to this place, which seems like a good sign. We’d go to Iceland again; we know how we would spend an entirely different three weeks next time. This sense of depth and richness, too much to explore in the time allotted, adds a layer of anticipation and sparkling potential to our plans. Rather than FoMO, it’s more like adding a sense that we’re following the Yellow Brick Road without yet knowing what is down the other colors of brick pathways. I make an index card for each of the cities in my rough draft of our trip. I write the city’s name, the estimated number of days from the guidebook, whether they have campsites and vegan restaurants, and the attractions that are most likely to interest us. We don’t need to bother with kids’ activities; we don’t do wine tours, bars, or nightclubs; we don’t like package tours; we have very particular taste in museums. A nautical museum rated as ‘boring’ in the guidebook would probably be right up our alley. We love archaeology. Part of our friendship is based on our mutual interest in several eras of history, and we know we won’t be selfishly indulging ourselves by boring each other. That’s my job on Birdwatching Day. (The worst part about birdwatching together is that he’s better at it; he spotted his first ptarmigan days before I saw mine). I show the index cards to my honey. I explain about the missing major city, and that we’ll have to figure out for ourselves how many days to spend there. We look at the map together and realize that one of my picks, a major three-star city, is quite a distance from all the others. He suggests that we postpone it and add it as the starting point of the five-week dream trip. Yay! This idea is a classic example of how I tend to make things needlessly complicated, and then he takes one look and simplifies it in the best way. I am so relieved. The days add up correctly. Travel times between each of our cities are roughly the same. We started with a total blank, and now we have a plan that makes sense. There is still a lot left to do, but the broad sketch is there. You can tell what it’s supposed to be. I am the planner on our team; he books the tickets, rooms, and rental cars, while I figure out where to go, what to do, and what to eat. I also get the house ready and plan the packing lists. These tasks are divided by aptitude, but also by our personal desire to have control over these areas. I developed a method during our big Iceland trip, one that turned out to have some glaring flaws and blind spots, and we learned a lot. We learned how much we overpacked. We learned how important it is not to use a half-price four-year-old guidebook. We learned that we each need our own copy of my extensive spreadsheets, maps, and checklists. We learned to map out the grocery store in each town. We learned how far in advance we need to be training physically if we want to carry our packs comfortably and avoid blisters. The next step is to sit down with a calendar, a rail map, and a train schedule. I’ll mark which attractions are closed on particular days of the week. I’ll figure out whether any major festivals or events are coming up, and whether to try to attend or avoid them. For each town, I’ll figure out which sites we can see on the same day and what order we’ll see everything. I’ve already looked at estimated average temperatures for the time of year, and I’ve realized that I don’t have enough appropriate clothes right now. While I’m mentally spinning a capsule wardrobe, I’m also trying to narrow down which book to bring on the flight. It’s starting to look real. I’ve made this post as vague and abstract as possible. I’ll post where we actually went after the trip is done, since that seems safer. More importantly, I wanted to talk about the planning stage of a trip, for those who have even less experience than I do. (My husband and I have been together for ten years, and this will be our fourth major trip together. It’s only the second trip that will last more than five days). I’ve been flying alone since the age of 7, and my hubby and I are both experienced at camping and going on road trips together. Our familiarity with each other is responsible for about half our fun; the preparation covers the other half. We never want to be like the couple we overheard screaming at each other for two days during our honeymoon: “What KIND of a person… FORGETS a BAG?!?” The more systems we build, the more we put on autopilot, the more we can trust ourselves and each other… and relax. We just got back from a weekend in Vegas. The post-vacation feeling is a great reminder of why we live a healthier lifestyle the other 99% of the time. Exhausted, dehydrated, baggy eyelids, sore feet, and smoke-infused suitcases. We’re vacationed out. I shudder to think how we would feel if booze were involved! Las Vegas is still one of our favorite cities to visit, and in many ways, it’s a fitness paradise. Vegas is a model city in one important way, and that’s its friendliness to pedestrians. There is a monorail, a reliable bus system, and an endless supply of taxis. The Strip itself is 4.2 miles in length, and I’m pretty sure my hubby and I have walked all of it. It has its annoyances, but overall it’s a safe and entertaining place to walk. The other night, we saw a British man walk by wearing an empty Corona Light beer carton on his head, while carrying on what sounded like an intelligent (and sober) conversation. A panhandler asked us, in a comedy voice, “Will you join my club and be my friend?” One of the best features of the Vegas Workout is that there are staircases everywhere, indoors and outdoors. I don’t take the stairs to maintain my youthful figure; I actually take the stairs so that I know I can take the stairs in an emergency. Use it or lose it. I saw The Towering Inferno on network TV when I was a child, and it made a strong impression. I had to descend 7 flights of stairs once due to a broken elevator, a relatively boring non-issue, so I can’t think of a reason to let my stair mojo lapse. The other reason to take the stairs, even when there is an escalator on either side, is that nobody is ever on the staircase. I get impatient. You know that feeling, when a slow driver is driving in the fast lane and you can’t get past? Yeah, that feeling. There needs to be a 1-mph sidewalk lane and a 3-mph sidewalk lane. The Overlord came with us. That’s my pet name for my Apple Watch. I like it because it’s one of the few material objects that keeps me honest. I can buy a book and pretend that I’m not going to add it to the stack of 50 unread books I already have at home. I can buy a box of Thin Mints (guess what? They’re vegan!) and pretend I’m not going to hide them from my husband and eat them all in three days. I wear the Apple Watch, and I can’t pretend I move or stand up more than I actually do. Here are some data: Saturday: 6.79 miles, 200% movement goal, exercised 59/30 minutes. This day included a 4-hour drive. Sunday: 5.14 miles, exercised 36/30 minutes. Monday: 9.76 miles, 200% movement goal, exercised 70/30 minutes. Hubby went to hotel gym. Tuesday: 4.17 miles, exercised 36/30 minutes. We overslept, drove home, and sat around like jellyfish. Most of Tuesday’s metrics come from the period between midnight and 2 AM. One of the most interesting things I learned from taking The Overlord to Vegas was that applauding apparently counts toward the hourly stand-up goal. Sitting in a chair and intently watching acrobats is a different type of activity than sitting on a couch and watching Real Housewives. I mean, I am a “real housewife” and nobody wants to watch me cleaning out the lint trap in my dryer…. About those acrobats. Every time we go to Vegas, I feel this deep-seated desire to level up my workout. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of acrobats and dancers in Sin City, performing in scanty outfits and displaying their million rippling muscles with the utmost grace and precision. There are three fascinating things about dancers:
When I see acrobats doing their thing, I find myself asking whether I do anything in my life with that level of dedication and focus. Anything at all. There is something about being in the zone, what is known as the flow state, that seems to dispel stress, anxiety, and bad moods. Dance itself is highly pleasurable. The more they enjoy it, the more they practice, the better they get, the more they enjoy it. Probably lots of things are like that. I like ballroom dance, and I’m competent at it, but I don’t do it as often as I’d like. The difference between professional dancers and myself is that they’ve made the commitment to dance as often as possible, and quit doing all those petty things that are not dance. I, on the other hand, will procrastinate on doing fun things and lose track of how very long it’s been since the last time. We were walking down the Strip when a lovely blonde woman in athletic gear walked by. She was moving at a faster pace and quickly passed us. We speculated about her workout based on her body composition. You know that swimmers have broad shoulders, cyclists have big quads, distance runners have big hamstrings and flat butts, etc. This woman was so firm that the muscles in her back stood out a half inch above the line of her spine. Have you noticed? When I see a very fit woman, I take an acute interest. I want to know what workout she does and whether they have a studio in my area. I want to know how long it took her to develop to that level. I feel elated that what I am seeing in another person is a possibility for the human form. I often see other women my age or older who have better posture and more muscle than I do, and it’s encouraging. Not everyone feels that way. I have caught other women giving me side-eye or looking me up and down. If you’re going to do that, and then make eye contact with me, at least fake-smile afterward? My husband says he saw a woman my age outright glaring at me. “Was she alone?” I asked. “Yeah.” “Well, there you go.” The way I look has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s between me and my endocrinologist. It’s not a zero-sum game. Quit being mad at fit people and start asking what they’re (we’re) doing differently. That’s what I did. I got fit as an experiment, because I had never tried it, and the result was an end to my chronic health problems. The main reason I walk 6 miles a day is because if I skip a few days, my chronic neck and shoulder tension come back. I walk to swing my arms, not my legs, if that makes sense. I spend way too much time hunching over a keyboard to want to be sedentary 100% of the time. Of course, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Working out has nothing to do with weight loss. It doesn’t! Working out is for mood maintenance, pain management, posture and gait correction, transportation, fun, stamina, and something to do while avoiding sitting down as much as possible. Sitting kills. It also leads to back pain, neck pain, and shoulder pain. Staying fit all year helps us to feel ready, willing, and able to spend 16 hours a day on our feet, having a blast on vacation. Our strategy for weight maintenance has more to do with food. We assume we’ll gain weight on vacation, because we almost always do, so we know we have to behave consistently at least 80% of the time. We also remind ourselves of all the times we’ve overindulged to the point that we felt crummy afterward. Too much sugar is the worst offender. The most important thing we do is to drink water and avoid sweet drinks. One of our other strategies is to skip lunch entirely if we slept late and had a late breakfast. Last year I insisted on a late lunch because I didn’t want to wait until our 7 PM dinner reservations, and then I ate everything in the bread basket, plus two appetizers, an entrée, and dessert. I felt like a Willy Wonka character the rest of the night. I’ve been working hard to develop an awareness of where I am on the hunger/fullness scale, and to keep it below an 8 at all times. At home, I try to stay between a 4 and a 6, as recommended, and on vacation I will occasionally go to a 7. A 7 is high enough to remind me of why I don’t eat that much on a daily basis. It’s not really comfortable. Even though we eat scads of vegetables, overeating still feels bad. It makes me want to lie down and take a nap, and that’s not what we go on vacation to do. I’m writing this on Tuesday night, after barely getting home in time to pick up our pets from the “pet resort.” (No pool, no gym, though I do hear they get room service and they can order pedicures). The great mystery remains to be solved: what will our weigh-ins be like tomorrow morning? We haven’t been on a scale in five days. Will walking 25.86 miles and climbing a few hundred stair steps counterbalance all the restaurant food we ate? Answer: Nope! I'm up 2.3 pounds in 4 days. Walking close to a marathon distance over the same period? Not enough. It'll be gone by the end of the week, though, because we fall back to our alternate eating plan when our weight is up. We have 3-4 more trips scheduled between now and the summer solstice, and if we don't keep to a plan, we'd have to buy a bigger size of clothes by July. Vacations are a lot more fun when we aren't afraid to go out in public in our swimsuits. Queues. Lists. Bookmarks. Playlists. It’s not enough that we can fill our homes with stacks of paper representing stored information. Now we can even fill the intangible world of the Cloud with electronic representations of information! It follows us everywhere. Even in our sleep, the junk mail, spam, email, newsletter subscriptions, and algorithmic recommendations of new TV shows, books, articles, movies, music, and products keep coming at us. They’re etheric arrows aiming straight at our thought bubbles. What are we going to do with it all? How are we going to keep up? When are we going to get “caught up”? There is no “catching up” to anything. It’s the Catch-22 of journaling. The more time I spend trying to track the details of my life for posterity, the more time I must dedicate to journaling, until the day I find myself meta-journaling about my journaling habit. There isn’t anything left to write about except the process of writing. The same is true of managing the constant influx of new information. If we genuinely try to “keep up” with all of it, eventually that’s the only thing we’ll do. This is what we mean when we talk about focusing on the past, the present, or the future. Past Self has made a lot of decisions for us about desirable ways to spend our time. Past Self loves to try to assign us binge-watching episodes, magazine articles, books, and especially recipes. We look at Past Self’s stacks, shrug, and address them to Future Self. My grandmother, for example, has been reading through all the books she already owns but hadn’t “gotten around to” yet. Some are from the 1970s. This gives me pause, because I’m working on the same project, and I have books in my stack that I bought about a decade ago. On a scale of 1-10, I’m probably at around a 7 for information hoarding. We do paperless billing. I do my writing digitally. I’ve been working on reading through my book collection and redefining what I consider a “reference” book. I’ve been going through cookbooks (my biggest area of clutter) and winnowing them. We don’t have cable, and the most TV we’ll watch is a purchased season of a TV series every couple of months. So I’m getting better. I do, however, still have an ungainly collection of notebooks, loose notes, and more index cards than a casino has playing cards. There are about 3600 recipes in my digital recipe collection. I have 89 e-books and audio books on my digital library wish list. Well, for one library. In the interest of full disclosure, there are 560 on my other library account. As for saved articles, I have no idea, but it’s a lot more than 560. I understand that I have assigned my Future Self at least three years’ worth of reading. That’s assuming that I never see another book or article that interests me. If snow fell in hell, or pigs flew, there would undoubtedly be articles published about these events, and I would undoubtedly bookmark them and plan to read them “later.” In other words, I haven’t yet gotten my head around the idea that THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME. I can only pretend I’ll be able to “catch up.” I can only pretend that time has no meaning in certain circumstances. I can only pretend that there is a wormhole, which I will find, which will enable me to read as much as I want outside the flow of years, minutes, and hours. My areas of info hoarding are pretty specific. I have no real limits on my writing notes, even though I’ve already determined that paper notes are unsafe. My sole copies of these ideas and bits of reference material are totally vulnerable to loss, water damage, or fire. I can’t access them from remote locations, which is bad, because most of my work is not done at home. This is an example of a specific problem, with a specific solution, for a specific purpose. My issue with no-limit, no-boundary leisure reading is on the opposite end of the scale. I don’t have specific purposes for reading books and articles; I just want to. My stack of paper notes, notebooks, files, and index cards is finite and measurable. My queue of pleasure reading material is more or less infinite. The sort of info hoarding among my clients is all over the map. Almost everyone has at least a little trouble organizing papers and electronic information, even regular folk who are not chronically disorganized. People who have no other clutter often have paper clutter. There are some common areas of focus, though. Mail (real, important mail) Mail (junk mail, often disguised as real mail) Old academic papers (notes, notebooks, handouts) PHOTOGRAPHS Recipes Magazine or newspaper clippings Personal letters / cards / e-mail Invitations that need decisions Business cards Keepsakes (invitations, event programs, favors, souvenirs, ticket stubs) The prime question when evaluating information is, WHAT DO I PLAN TO DO WITH IT? Obviously, important mail needs to get processed. Bills need to be paid, checks need to be deposited, bank statements need to be reconciled, subpoenas need to be answered. Invitations can be ignored until the date has passed, a habit we indulge until the day we ourselves schedule something for which we desire RSVPs. EVERYTHING ELSE can sit indefinitely. That’s fine – there’s nothing necessarily wrong with owning a stack of paper – except that paper has a nefarious tendency to get on top of more important paper and hide it. It takes constant vigilance to track and process the important stuff. What do we think we’re going to do with our old academic papers? I scanned mine and put them on a thumb drive. I have never needed any of them. I think I thought they might come in handy one day, if I met a younger person who wanted an example of a certain type of academic paper. I saved scanned images if they had a grade I liked scrawled on them. “Looky, an A!” Needless to say, though I tend to have a lot of college-aged kids in my life at any given moment, none of them has ever asked to see my old papers. I suspect I’m keeping them as proof that I put myself through school. The point, though, is that we learned that material. Education should be a starting point, not an ending point. It’s true that I’ve gone on to read and learn a lot more about history since I got my degree. I can’t learn much from reading my own papers or my own notes. If I went back to grad school at some point, I wouldn’t be pursuing a master’s in history; I already made that decision. I save my old notes because they fit on the thumb drive, and I don’t have to make the decision to delete them based on space. What do we think we’re going to do with all the photographs? At a certain point, I transitioned to digital photographs. Everything I have in a hard copy is old. I have at least 100x more photographs of the people I care about now than I did 20 years ago. They’re of better quality and they tend to reflect moments of daily life rather than artificial poses and awkward smiles. I also take scads of photos of random things, because it’s so easy and because I always have a camera in my pocket now. The aluminum box that contains my photo collection is almost never opened. I seem to remember looking through everything in it about 7 years ago, when I did a burning ceremony, but those photos are not a part of my daily life. If they were, I would have put them in frames. (Frames, not flames). What do we think we’re going to do with all the recipes? I’m probably the worst offender in the world when it comes to clipping recipes. Not only do I have the 3600 digital recipes, I have no fewer than four recipe apps on my phone. I also have a box of recipes on index cards and a collection of roughly 50 cookbooks. I’m not going to run out! The funniest thing about this is that I don’t always use recipes anymore. We tend to cook the same vegetables in the same ways. I probably only test out a new recipe about once a month now. Every now and then, I freak out about how many untested recipes I have. Even if I had done one a day since then, I still would not have made a dent. What do we think we’re going to do with all the magazine or newspaper clippings? This is a big one for a lot of people. My issue is that I think I’m going to read them all one day. Since I always bookmark more each day than I read, I could only “catch up” if I quit bookmarking anything for the rest of the year. I’m better off giving up on the older stuff and limiting myself to a certain amount of reading time per day. I have yet to make that happen. For many people, the issue is rather one of preserving information they’ve already read. They want to save it. For what, though? What are they going to do with the information? How are they going to let it change their lives? Are they researching a specific project? If not, well, my philosophy is to ‘read and delete.’ I tend to want to forward everything to everyone, but I can’t force other people to be interested in things they aren’t. If I read it and it doesn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember it, change my mind, or change my behavior, eh, easy come easy go. What do we think we’re going to do with the letters, cards, and email? It turns out that a lot of people get these personal missives and freeze. We can’t bring ourselves to return the favor and write back. When we do this (talking to myself here), we’re effectively rejecting the other person’s gesture of love and connection. They don’t see it as shyness or a desire to wait until the proper attention can be summoned to do it justice. They just see it as a disconnect. Old letters often represent a broken love affair, vanished friendship, or family connection that could have been made stronger. We hang on to these tokens out of grief and regret. Far better to reach out by other means, rebuild connections, and let the tokens go. Invitations that need decisions are in the same category. Delay the decision too long and the decision has been made. REJECTED AND DENIED. We let ourselves off the hook. Often, our default response is ‘no.’ We have to double check and make sure that ‘no’ is really the setting we want for life. We’ll never know what would have happened if we had shown up, unless we do show up. Business cards also represent potential connections and decisions that need to be made. So much of the time, we take someone’s card, and then never follow through. That’s fine – a business card is a very inexpensive, low-risk form of advertising – but perhaps we can start making the decisions earlier in the process. We don’t have to keep these cards forever. Most people have some kind of web presence if we look. What do we think we’re going to do with the souvenirs and mementos? This can be a dangerous area. Almost anything can be construed as a souvenir. I saved an all-day lollipop from a trip to Disneyland for about 10 years. For some reason, I thought that would be a great souvenir, even though I had also saved the ticket stubs. Then I found this sucker again. (See what I did there?) It was melted and stuck all over everything. It had in fact ruined other things I had intended to save. I’m really lucky my papers weren’t swarming with ants. As with many things, keeping clutter left me worse off than getting rid of it. Dealing with the flow of information is a problem that will never end. It’s like laundry, except that laundry doesn’t follow you into the Cloud. It helps to make categorical decisions. Why would I want to keep old school papers? Why would I want to save clippings or recipes? How often am I going to dedicate an hour of my life to looking through old photos or yearbooks? Which types of events am I never going to miss, and which will I always avoid? When we have figured out why we’re tracking or keeping information, we can start with what arrives from that day forward. Whether we ever get around to going through the older stuff is more of a philosophical question. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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