#scheduling this to post on The Worst Day of the Year™ as an attempt to counteract the traumaversariness and general horrible feelings

[keltonwrites]

When's your off-season?

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Do you have a personal off-season? Can you?

My life here is supported by a resort town. There’s not a single amenity in our “town”, so we head into the actual town 25 minutes away for restaurants, stores, salons, etc. Those businesses all operate on a resort schedule, which is the closest American Industry gets to European. Beginning in late October through early December, hours are reduced and many places close up for a well-earned off-season. And I love every moment of minor inconvenience. Good for you, Siam Thai. Get out of here! No problem, ski shop. You go climb those mountains.

Unfortunately my own sanctioned off-season this time of year probably looks like yours: here are two days off — we know you’re likely spending them negotiating familial relationships, walking on Covid eggshells, trying to recover from years of getting hammered by 40-hr-work-weeks that are actually boundary-less tethers to tiny dinny nightmare sounds coming from your tracking device, all while cooking an actual feast you haven’t practiced in a year — but we hope you come back refreshed on Monday because Carl scheduled that 8am. (Carl thinks we should be back in the office because he’s a sycophant who believes the American Dream is real. Carl doesn’t give a shit what timezone you’re in.)

Corporate jobs don’t have off-seasons. And no, vacation days don’t count, because the point of shutting down the whole business is that there’s not 738 emails waiting to destroy your newly replenished zen when you get back. Which is why I believe in manufacturing your own off-seasons: breaks from fitness, upping the frequency of takeout meals, a pre-determined month of caring less when the house is a mess, a couple weeks’ work of “phoning it in” which I love and have loved since college when I realized it was possible to give a C performance and still get A- life results. And to be clear, despite years of professional work promoting it, I’m not talking about self-care. I am instead talking about self-reallocation-of-care. For me, the perfect off-season isn’t punctuated by massages and elaborate tea routines, it’s just doing a whole lot less of the bullshit and a whole lot more of the best shit.

But what is the best shit?

I have to give my brain a long enough break from the day-to-day to even figure out what a fulfilling day even is. A natural place to start here is to just think about what you’re grateful for. But when I’ve attempted gratitude journals in the past, it gets a little old writing “my legs, Finn, Ben, parents, the outdoors” over and over again. So instead, I like to think about what I regret. After all, when we sit around talking about what we’re grateful for, we’re just dancing around what we regret, or more often, what we’re attempting to not regret, e.g., ignoring your children, spending your life at a desk, never seeing Paris or whatever. Gratitude is a nostalgia-laced reverence, a practice of really nesting in the good things brought into our lives, where regret is that same nostalgia-driven awe, just this time with a big ole complicated layer of “whoops.”

I only have one serious regret — the rest all fall under the categories of “learning experiences” and “well what are ya gonna do.” (I guess the third category is “yes, I absolutely wouldn’t have gone to that restaurant that night” but that’s rewriting history — not choosing a better decision.) My biggest regret is when I had something really good and I let another person convince me it wasn’t. Or, in more explicit terms, I had a popular Tumblr from 2010-2013 that was optioned into a book and instead of converting that audience to a newsletter or different platform and continuing to write for myself, I just let it die because my Worst Boyfriend™ convinced me it (and I) were trash.

I used to resent him for that, but it was my choice. There will always be people who want to influence your decisions — usually not with any malice. But an off-season, a time when I let my brain get a full dose of introspection, allows me to pay closer attention to what’s bringing me real joy and flow immersion. When I can pay attention like this, and burrow into that feeling, I’m not so easily led astray in the woods.

Sort of like moving to this town in the first place.

“Isn’t that kind of far from a hospital?” “Aren’t you worried about avalanches?” “Do you even have snow tires?”

I had conviction around this decision. (To be fair, I also didn’t have any manipulative sacs of bitterness in my circle anymore.) Which brings me to the present, an off-season if I ever had one. Living somewhere without endless city entertainments, my job in transition with our budget slashed, friends to see in person at a near all-time low, and only six hours of actual sunshine — there’s not a lot to do but dedicate myself to figuring out what I want to do with myself.

At the tail-end of my last off-season, I and three other women set out to read Designing Your Life together. I was swimming with big ideas and bigger dreams, and I needed to shape the clay of them into something I could use, which is exactly what that book advertised it could help with. For the most part, I really enjoyed that book, but one exercise struck me as particularly futile. It asked for you to write down a thing you love, e.g., “the outdoors” or “making to-do lists”, and then make a word web in all directions under a time limit, and at the end, circle the words you wanted to be a bigger part of your life. I remember thinking this was so dumb. Then earlier this week, I came across all these old papers while unpacking. Here are the words I circled:

Home decor

Sharing

Community

Inspiration

Tropical

Rustic

Connection

Stories

Newsletter

*Gestures around at exactly what I’m doing right now, in a house I themed #tropicabin, sharing my stories and building a little community of people who care via a newsletter.*

Which brings me back to my big regret: abandoning the blog I worked tremendously hard to build. I knew when I was working on that blog that I was fulfilled. Is it ironic to do years of on-and-off soul-searching to come to the same conclusion that you did years ago? This is the plot of countless successful movies, after all. It took me a few years, and a couple very good off-seasons, but here I am, spinning my regret back in the gratitude direction.

So I want to say thank you for supporting this writing endeavor. I don’t wake up each day excited to log in to work, but I do wake up excited to work on this. And I still get questions that make me doubt myself.

“Are you doing it to just practice your writing?” “Do people actually read it?” “It seems a little aimless?”

But thanks to the right kind of rest, my conviction is happy to answer: no, yes, so?

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We have to give ourselves off-seasons. It wasn’t that long ago that humans knew a couple hundred people and read the paper and a few books. We have got to give ourselves a break because no one else is going to give it to us. Shut your kitchen down. Shut your social down. Put an out-of-office on your personal email. We need our own permission slips to care less about some things so we can care more about finding and funding and defending the things that light us up.

Here’s my recommendation for a little Sunday journaling in the afternoon sun: Use the past week of stirring up the pot of gratitude to see which regrets are adding that depth of flavor to the stew. Write down all the joy-giving things in your life, from things you do frequently to things you rarely get to do. Then, write down your regrets and what you would do differently. The reality is, we can always start “differently” right now. Be more honest, commit more deeply, love bigger, draw stronger boundaries, and so on. Finally, give yourself a time-constrained off-season. Put it on the calendar. “Do not spend time picking up the house.” Because it doesn’t matter how good your list of loves’n’loathes is if you don’t give your brain the space to figure out how to apply that to your life.

So when I’m re-shaping that ball of clay called life, I try to remember this:

Gratitude tells us what we’re getting right

Regret tells us what we could get right

And rest tells us how

It’s been almost a decade since I was this excited about my own ball of clay. It took one off-season to realize what I had, one to realize what I wanted, and this one to finally pursue it. Thank you being the ones to help me shape it.

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#newsletter #home renovation #am writing #log cabin #offseason #shangrilogs #gratitude #regret