At the beginning of 2019, I went to the Alaskan rainforest to recover from a serious illness. I've been thinking recently about my time there. Those months were a prolonged and necessary retreat from everything. I just hiked and meditated and did arts and crafts.
Sitka was great because all of these things were possible AND there was good, accessible medical care. Unfortunately, it was also enormously expensive. Social activity was pretty much limited to churches and bars. My best friends there were ravens.
My time in Sitka established the trajectory of the last few years. There, I set the goal of completing ten science fiction novels in five years, and now I have done that. Some good books came out of it. So too did the discipline to actually complete such a undertaking over a span of years.
The question I'm sitting with now is where to point that discipline in the future. It would be easy to point it at another ambitious yet solitary endeavor. And maybe I'll be inspired to do just that. Another possibility would be to participate in something larger and more collaborative. I might prefer this, if the project was right.
While I think about everything, life goes on. My family is in mourning after the unsurprising death of its matriarch. My special someone is amazingly supportive. I submitted an article to a magazine today and they'll probably reject it. But you never know.
This afternoon, after a blizzard, I was walking on the sidewalk by an apartment building. A foot of snow had accumulated on everything, including the building's roof. All of the sudden, a great mass of snow slid off of the building's sloped roof, slamming into the ground just a few feet in front of me. Had I been walking even a little more quickly, I would have been crushed by this mass of snow, weighing hundreds of pounds or more. Instead, I merely witnessed the hazard from a safe distance.
A few passersby saw the episode and called me lucky. I considered them to be the lucky ones because they were a much safer distance away, but I didn't tell them this. I just grinned and continued walking to the grocery store. Inside, however, I wasn't feeling at all lucky. Instead, I felt warned.
This is how I interpret surprising near-misses. They're not the time to celebrate luck. They're a warning to exercise caution. An invitation to slow down and pay closer attention.
Fortunately, slow and attentive is my default setting. My current challenge in this arena is maintaining patience while interacting with family around my grandma's death. This hasn't come up so far and perhaps it won't come up at all. I generally get along with my relatives.
If Alaska is on my mind, it might be because I produced almost nothing while I was there, yet my time there was nonetheless extremely productive.
Read my novels:
See my NFTs:
