Restore: Finding My Way Back to Myself

When I chose Restore as the third part of my August rhythm — Rest, Notice, Restore, Renew — I thought I understood what it meant. Then the week arrived and I found myself asking a surprisingly difficult question.

Restore what? And how?

My first thought was energy. Surely restoration means doing things that give me my energy back. But when I looked at it that way, the list was pretty short. Eating helps. Sleeping helps. Beyond that, most of the things I enjoy either use energy or simply give my brain a rest for a while. Reading doesn't magically refill the tank. Neither does playing a game, walking through a garden or working on my field journal.

Maybe I had been asking the wrong question.

When life knocks me out of my usual rhythm, it can take me a week or two to recover. Calgary was wonderful, but it was also a very full week. I walked more than usual, saw new things every day, took hundreds of photographs and filled my head with experiences I wanted to remember. When it was over, I didn't go directly home. I went back to Toronto with Rob.

It was nice to stop moving quite so much and begin getting some of my normal back.

Some of that was very ordinary. There was shopping to do. In Toronto it was coffee and some of the things they don't keep at Rob's house. When I finally returned to Peterborough, it was groceries for the week. Necessities, really, but there is something reassuring about buying groceries for the coming week. It means I am back in my own life and preparing to live it again.

Staying at Rob's can be a challenge sometimes. He lives with his mother and brother, so there are always other people and other people's things around. But his brother has created a beautiful garden in the backyard, and it has become a refuge for me. In the morning I could take my coffee and whatever I was having for breakfast outside to the gazebo, sit among the flowers and listen to the sounds of the garden. Even the June bugs had their own song.

At home in Peterborough, there isn't a gazebo waiting for me. I open my window instead. I sit at my desk with breakfast and coffee and listen to whatever is happening outside. They aren't the same morning, but I realized they do the same thing for me. They give me a quiet place to begin the day before I ask anything more of myself.

There is also a little sitting room at Rob's that I have more or less claimed as my sanctuary. It has a loveseat and a table, although I have to overlook the computer equipment scattered everywhere. I did most of my work there. I read there. I relaxed there. For a while it became an almost-home, a place where I could settle into some of the things I normally do.

I found other almost-home things too. Walking through the garden reminded me of my usual turns around my building and my occasional visits to the garden nearby. Reading and playing my games brought back familiar parts of my routine. Working on the pages for my Calgary field journal let me return to the adventure, but this time without all the physical effort. I could revisit what I had seen, choose photographs, remember details and enjoy the trip again in an entirely different way.

 

Eventually, though, I came home.

There were little moments when I could feel my life clicking back into place. Walking around my building on the new pavement felt surprisingly good. Touching base with my son felt right. Spending time with Ness and Dean after Aquafit felt familiar. Even talking with the Outsiders felt like a return to something I recognized. Rob lives in a suburban neighbourhood that actively discourages people from hanging around outside. Here, people stop and talk.

Going back to Aquafit felt almost like coming home.

Then this morning I made my bed.

It is such a silly little thing. I make my bed every day, so there is nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Except this morning there was. I looked at it and thought, yeah, my routines are back in place. This is home.

My own room. My own mess. My own window. My own sounds. Even my fan at night matters. Rob has a fan too, but it doesn't sound like mine. Mine drowns out the world in exactly the way I am accustomed to, and apparently even that tiny familiar sound helps restore my equilibrium.

I think that's what I was missing when I kept trying to figure out how to restore my energy.

Restoration, at least for me, isn't necessarily about getting energy back. Sometimes it is the gradual return of the things that make my life recognizable to me. A cup of coffee in a quiet place. A book. A familiar walk. Making something. Seeing my family. Going to Aquafit. Making the bed. Hearing the right fan when I close my eyes at night.

Travel disrupts those things, and that's part of the adventure. I don't want every day away from home to look exactly like a day at home. But apparently I do need some familiar threads running through my days, even when I'm somewhere else. And when I return, I need time to pick those threads back up.

Maybe that is why restoration happens so slowly for me. I don't come home, get a good night's sleep and wake up restored. I come back a little at a time.

One routine. One person. One familiar sound. One ordinary thing after another.

Until one morning I make the bed, look around and realize:

There I am.

 

Following Curiosity

Most of my walks naturally fit this month's theme without me trying to make them fit. I don't set out thinking, "I need material for the blog." I simply go for a wander or two, and the story appears.

When I looked back over the week, I realized the story wasn't really about the places I visited. I think it's about what an adventure has become for me. It isn't going to BC or Ottawa. Those were the kinds of experiences I thought of as adventures.

 These days, adventure has taken on a different meaning. It might be following my curiosity down an unfamiliar street, noticing something I'd probably walked past for years, checking on a photography project, or realizing that morning glories are appearing all over the city.

Morning glories became part of a project I hadn't expected to begin. At first they were simply beautiful flowers climbing the trees and covering the raspberry bed in the back corner of the garden. I watched them slowly smother the raspberry canes in one corner until nothing else could grow there. That's when I learned that, although beautiful, they can also overwhelm everything around them. While out on one of my walks, I came across a hedge completely covered in morning glory vines and couldn't help wondering if the same thing would happen there. I've started photographing that hedge every couple of weeks to see how the story unfolds.

 Those photographs are becoming a pictorial essay I'm calling Deadly Beauty. I never planned that project. It grew out of simply paying attention.

The same thing happened with a couple of robins. I didn't go looking for them; they found me. Anyone who has ever tried photographing robins knows they rarely stay in one place for more than a few seconds. These two seemed perfectly content to let me stand there taking photographs until I had several I was genuinely happy with. Those photographs have already become more than pictures. They've inspired a journal page and even a writing prompt. Once again, curiosity quietly opened another creative door.

 That's a very different definition of adventure, and I think many of you will recognize yourselves in it. There are so many things to see if we simply spend the time looking. I don't think these discoveries were hidden. They had probably been there all along. I just wasn't paying enough attention to notice them.

As I looked back over the week, it occurred to me that my adventures naturally fell into two groups. There were the larger adventures, like turning down an unfamiliar street just to see where it led. Then there were the smaller adventures—the discoveries that only happened because I'd made that choice in the first place.

Maybe that's the real lesson. Adventure doesn't always ask us to go farther. Sometimes it simply asks us to look more closely.

Today's adventure can be solitary and unplanned, like wandering down an unfamiliar street. Tomorrow's adventure could be shared and planned—a family meal, a movie, laughter, and time together. It is becoming clear to me that adventure isn't one thing. Sometimes it's wandering without a destination. Sometimes it's making time for the people you love. Sometimes it's both.

As I was writing about my week, I found myself thinking that my July theme of Freedom & Play has quietly been present all along. Freedom isn't just choosing a different street to walk down. It's also giving yourself permission to be curious, to linger, to photograph an empty storefront because it means something to you, and to let an ordinary Friday afternoon become part of your story.

Maybe that's the biggest change of all. I used to measure adventure by how far I travelled. Now I measure it by how closely I pay attention.

 So, dear reader, here's an invitation. You don't need to book a holiday or climb a mountain. Your next adventure might begin by taking the long way home, noticing the flowers growing on a neighbour's porch, or turning down a street you've always meant to explore. You may discover, as I have, that the farther you let your curiosity wander, the richer your ordinary days become.