Dear World: I Have Become—Brace Yourself—an Outdoorsy Person

Staying still can teach you things

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

---

When you know you need to get off the computer and find yourself again, I can't recommend a chainsaw enough.

Buying this farmhouse in the countryside has taught me SO MUCH about what I want from life. I always used to think that travel teaches you more about yourself than anything else—and, it does—but I’ve also learned that staying still can teach you things, too.

Staying still is an act of discipline. It requires conviction that what you are currently doing is what you want to be doing; that you are not wasting your time. There’s nothing worse than the ticking time bomb of deep dissatisfaction.

And yet, I have found more satisfaction in the simplest of pleasures than I ever thought possible.

Like, I never could have predicted that I’d love—LOVE—mowing the lawn. What kind of sick joke is this? But, it’s therapeutic. It’s methodical. It’s like some sort of twisted act of devotion. I didn’t have many of those before. But, there’s something about being a custodian of the land: it makes you feel like you matter in a deeper, more fundamental way, in a way that’s not linked to your profession, and not on paper, and not on your resume.

How long have we been doing things just to be able to put them on our resume?

Welp, here’s my latest resume update:

• Can climb ten feet into the air on a ladder (like, at the pace of a sloth, but still???)

• Capable of cleaning out her own gutters without completely freaking out at whatever slimy muck she is currently touching up there (even when it falls all over her head and sticks in her hair)

• Can sweat her ass off shoveling giant rocks out of the ground and throwing them down the hill like some sort of crossfit evangelist so the new grass seed will hold (SO THEN SHE CAN MOW IT LIKE A CHAMP)

• Speaking of sweat, is also willing to finally stop worrying about *getting* sweaty and just accept that in order to get things done you are going to have to feel like a mucus-covered cow

• Willing to wear ridiculous clothing that isn’t the least bit figure flattering in the name of being able to actually move

• Able to, albeit begrudgingly, descend into the world’s creepiest basement, covered in spiders, and practically army crawl over to the section where you need to turn the water on in order to use the outdoor spigot

• Okay, I’m actually still screaming about that

• Will hook 100 foot hose up to pressure washer she has no idea how to operate and use it to clean green grime off the entire back of the house

• Can operate a manual four wheeler and hitch it to a wagon and use it to drag dirt around like a motherfucker

• Able to pick up a chainsaw, squirt oil into a chamber, and walk up to the little tree that’s fallen into the road, and actually be able to move it

• Versed in taking big risks with quirky wallpaper designs from Great Britain in rooms normal people would paint gray

• Able to clean toilet. Enough said.

These simple things, things that used to feel like chores, now feel like liberation.

What a privilege it is to do all of this.

I am able to climb ladders, I am able to pick up a shovel, I am to crawl into a basement, I am able to use my arms and my legs and my hands and my body. I am able to change things for the better; make something more beautiful, more lovely to look at, more celebrated.

Like most of us, I spent a lifetime making myself more beautiful, more lovely to look at, more celebrated.

How nice it is put effort into something new and meaningful.

And, to stay still long enough to do so, knowing that you are not wasting your time, that dissatisfaction can be replaced with hard work, that what you are doing is not selected by anyone else,

But because you wanted to.