My 16-year-old is leaving alone for a month of language school in Tokyo. Being born and raised outside of towns under population 700, closer to 300 in some cases, should put a dizzying spin on the experience. We’ve had epic urban adventures together, but not off this continent, certainly not in the vast compression of Tokyo. Send up a good thought for the kid because I’m understandably nervous. Meanwhile, I’m absolutely assured that they’ve got this.
I have three pieces of advice. You’ll be traveling solo, so double your wits about you. If you’re curious about something, if it draws your eye, explore farther. And, find small rhythms.
The latter is my joy. Helen Fields wrote about it for LWON last week with her sidewalk mulberries.
I advise that whatever rhythms you chance into, take note, brushing teeth at a wash basin before bed, sending out a text from the same place (to your dad), leaving the host family door and turning left (or right) to walk into the city. Every day you’ll spot the same odd street sign, blast of graffiti, or a constellation of gum stains on the sidewalk. Nod to them as you pass. Begin to detect the cadence in the encounters you have.
I ground myself by paying attention in this way. Brush a certain leaf in your hand as you come and go, and a small ceremony comes of it. Before we sleep and when we wake in the morning, I play a little tune on a wooden flute, hoping that in the general chaos of life, and having me as a dad, there’s at least a heartbeat to follow, a banging of a wrench against the hull of a sunken submarine, some sign of return, pattern, consistency. A sign of life.
The week before my high-schooler departs for Japan, the two of us set a camp half an hour out a dirt road in a cradle of mountains in Western Colorado. I wanted to get a good dose of alpine air into the kid’s lungs before reality becomes a daily commute into the downtown core of Shibuya City, the center of 14 million people. It’s an easy place to get wildly disoriented, I imagine. Our theater of late June mountains partly clad in snow will be a taste of home to remember.
Every day we drive into town from camp. We borrow a shower off a friend, hop online at a cafe or the library, take afternoon naps in park shade. My kid works a part-time job in a kitchen, and scoops ice cream from behind a counter in an establishment on a main street with slow daily traffic, nearest stoplight 30 miles away.
On the morning drive down from the mountains, we pass repeat landmarks, a muddy cattle tank steaming after sunrise, a good sized rock fallen into the road and best avoided, a patch of dense woods where every time we go by I comment on how lush it looks and that we should explore the grove someday.
Some people say I am peripatetic, chaotic, even reckless. But I do leave breadcrumbs.
Scientific material on health and repetition is mostly about circadian rhythms. If you go to bed and wake regularly in 24-hour patterns, which I don’t often do, overall mood and cognitive function tends to increase while chances of major depression and a litany of mental and physical disorders are decreased. Daily habits become a framework and you might live happily ever after by obeying them. I’m frequently on the road, and a happenstance wanderer by nature. Routines escape me, so I look elsewhere.
I don’t know the science that says a small prayer or a thought of gratitude makes the world better, not necessarily done at the same time every day, but at the same place. If time and space are a continuum, when is just as important as where. I drive the same highways again and again and rock faces or certain tall-standing trees are polished by my eyes, one glance every pass, like supplicants touching the feet of a golden Buddha. What value it offers is connection.
Time, I’ve noticed, has become blinding. Do you want to see my calendar? It feels like the time machine is picking up speed and I should strap in. But that’s my life, not my kid’s, who likes to be on time, who likes cities, and order.
One of the orders, I find, is what you encounter along the way, and what you encounter again on your way back. Find markers and pause at them, take a picture, write a note, or throw a glance as you go by, a way of belonging where you are.
Photo: Craig Childs
In life as in hiking/backpacking – good to leave breadcrumbs behind and be aware of markers coming & going.
well said…from one of your elders…routine, polish that rock, that tree, that sunset, that bird..with your searching eyes…Yes. Craig…your writing is right on…and elders understand what you are saying…so much cadence, so much sense.
Sending a rhythmic cadence of good thoughts to each of you as you each go your own way
Mindfulness as a way of life brings so many joys – largely, the tiny delights that spring from unexpected quarters. Best wishes to the young one on their journey. May they be embdued with confidence and self-posession. I have no doubt the experience will be both bewildering and enchanting.