On the Road Again

When my family made aliya, roughly twenty years ago, my primary responsibility was caring for our children. Blessedly, those boys and girls have since grown into young men and young women, who have children of their own. Presently, my familial charge is to pamper my grandchildren.

Correspondingly, any internal pressure that I currently live through is self-sourced, as opposed to the burdens of decades ago, an era when my offspring brought their school and relationship issues to me to help resolve. Hence, ages earlier, whenever I yearned to join a women’s getaway (assuming that we had the funds and assuming that my husband could cover for me), I felt no compunction. These days, in contrast, given my altered duties, I’m more hesitant to pay for my relaxation.

What’s more, I haven’t aged gracefully. I have digestive ills. More noticeably, I have trouble walking as well as have to be careful about a sustained back injury. Consequently, until last week, I’d not ventured far from home on my own.

My husband, however, thought that my physical challenges constituted an inadequate reason for me not to unwind. He posited that, if anything, my corporeal ills require me to take a break rather than to avoid one. Thus, he urged me to slow down, i.e., to release my everyday jobs, for the duration of a forty-eight hour vacation.

I appealed to various of my health care providers and to my rabbi. As it were, each and every one of them concurred with my Help Opposite.

Although I held fast to my perspective that I didn’t deserve such largesse, I signed up, anyway, for the affair and paid the requisite fee. Nonetheless, I continued to feel guilty about using my family’s time and money for my holiday. Similarly, I persisted in worrying about how my limited mobility might impact that adventure.

Hubs deconstructed my first set of concerns by claiming that us “saving for tomorrow” was pointless if I failed to arrive at a shared future. Moreover, my physiotherapist dismantled my second group of trepidations by showing me how to use Nordic walking sticks. She was confident that I would be able to wobble among the resort’s buildings. Additionally, the event coordinator asked me for a list of the sorts of help that I might need so that she could make such aid available. Plus, after making new friends at the retreat, I was graced with more offers of assistance than I needed.

So, I liberally applied inflammation-reducing salve to my knees, took respites as needed, and practiced the humility that’s concomitant to being physically compromised. More exactly, I dared myself to ask other women to carry tea or hot water for me across the place’s expansive cafeteria, asked a new friend to shlep my luggage to the checkout (Hubby had schlepped it into my room), and forewent programs offered at the grounds’ distant corners.

I’m grateful to be able to write that my limitations did nothing to bound the amount of ease that I was able to derive from the goings-on nor to curb the degree of fun that I had. To be more precise, I did what I could and made an effort to appreciate my days at the center.

I think my favorite part of my time off was the food. It was not so much that I was eager to try someone else’s cooking as it was that I was eager to talk with other women. For instance, I arrived at both breakfasts when the dining hall opened and lingered there for nearly the entire three hour duration of those meal services. Whereas I ate fairly modestly, I knocked back as much discourse as was possible.

See, I used to be a rhetoric professor, meaning an educator who empowered students with various skills, including public speaking. As of late, conversely, I’ve devoted the greater portion of my time to fulfilling book contracts. Writing, unlike teaching (especially if one includes office hours and leisurely chats held elsewhere), is a self-contained vocation. Likewise, at this time, when I work, I necessarily let calls go to voice mail and ignore Internet communications. Breaking free of my customary, chosen solitude was a welcomed change.

Furthermore, while on my shortcation, I enjoyed many opportunities to make visual art. Although I’m blessed to have my digital paintings and photographs incorporated on literary journals’ covers and in their interiors, I rarely set aside time for “messier” modalities. During my excursion, the other way around, I used watercolors for calligraphy and bouquets of flowers, cut and paste a mandala with actual glue and paper, and “snuck off campus” to a recycled materials studio, where I assembled a three dimensional work employing glass tiles, ceramic tiles, and gouache paint. Overall, my inner child was delighted with her many prospects for encountering line, color, and space that this pause offered.

What’s more, although I’m too weakened for beach hikes, yoga, and creative dance, all of which were expressions that I adored when more able-bodied, and all of which were principal elements of the wellness jaunt, I was able to participate in meditation and in breathing classes. Into the bargain, on the last morning of the escape, I hobbled around the destination’s property to take pictures with my point & shoot camera.

Outside of the aforementioned, I appreciated the quiet (I opted for a solo room), the reliable hot water, the chance to catch up on unread Dvrai Torah, and the slower pace. “Rest,” after all, is a relative commodity. Accordingly, this safta benefitted, on the one hand, from greater spans of serenity, and, on the other hand, from being able to access more people and more complex inventive outlets than typically I avail myself.

I’d gladly attend such a break, again. Sometimes, I forget that even though I’m a wibbly-wobbly grandma of fairly modest means, it behooves me to make the time and space to recharge.