Lately I’ve been thinking about the activities I’ve lost as my illness worsens and I have less energy to do the things I like. I feel like I’ve fallen into a hole of very few activities (other than writing), that keeps me from fully enjoying life.
For example, kayaking. I was doing well with a basic MEC kayak, though I sometimes had problems steering it. Then I got a real ocean kayak and it was a revelation—it moved through the water like a blade, and I could steer it properly and I even got excited when there was a bit of a chop to the water. But I haven’t been kayaking in at least five years. I can’t get the kayak on top of the truck, and Dave can’t kayak because of his shoulder injuries. So, either he has to come and hang out while I paddle, or I have to figure out how to reach the roof racks on the truck so I can get the kayak up there.
What about cycling? We used to cycle on the old railbed trail just 20 min south of us. We’d pack up the bikes in the back of the truck and head out for a 20 km ride. It was fun and got us outside, plus gave us a workout. Now I can’t remember when we were last out. Five years ago?
Then there were our photo fieldtrips. We used to go to different gardens (Horticultural Centre of the Pacific, Government House, Butchart Gardens, Hatley Castle) to take pictures of flowers and interesting architecture. But I’ve hardly touched my camera in the last two years, unless you count my phone photos from the trail on Cobble Hill Mountain. I feel like they’re a trimmed down form of a creative practice that I haven’t given up entirely. I may not use my heavy-duty camera, but I’m looking at the landscape with a photographer’s eye, searching for the right light and the right patterns.
So perhaps I haven’t forgotten everything. For example, I used to swim a lot in university, then gradually gave it up as my career progressed. But I’ve gotten back into the pool in the last two years and I’m really enjoying it. My body remembers the rolling motion of lifting one arm then the other out of the water for front crawl. The stretching of my back muscles when I do backstroke. The scent of chlorine in the air.
A friend of mine went to Mt Robson to do the Berg Lake trail. Her group cycled the 7 km to Kinney Lake, locked up their bikes, then hiked up to Berg Lake, came back down to Kinney Lake (28 km return trip) and rode back to the trailhead. All in one day. I was so impressed—and I thought to myself that I couldn’t do that. That’s another problem I have: negative self-talk. I don’t have confidence in my ability to do things. I brush off activities because I don’t think I can do them (though I really couldn’t pull off what my friend did without being in a lot better shape!).
All of the other changes, though, have a few things in common. One is that the amount of energy I have in a day is decreasing, which curtails a lot of my activities. The other thing is that we had a nervous solo dog for the last four years, and she went everywhere with us, which made going cycling, paddling, etc. difficult. Now that we’re dogless, however, we’ve been doing more things like hiking together on Cobble Hill Mountain three times a week.
I worry that my life has become small, contained, and regimented. Part of this is because I’ve been putting my energy into writing. I was talking to another friend who’s in the midst of writing her second book and she said she feels like all she does is write and read and look after her (four!) kids. She has to consciously make time to go outside and enjoy the weather and nature before holing up again to work on her book. What are we missing from life when we work hard on one project to the detriment of other life experiences?
I have a proposal for a second book that I’m keen to write, but I don’t want it to take over my whole life. It’s about being outdoors as a mentally ill person, so my personal experiences are important. I need to expand my outdoor activities and write about them, like hiking some of the trails I’ve never explored around here and going cycling and kayaking again. It’s not healthy for me to only do writing and nothing else.
I also have to consider that different experiences aren’t just for writing about, but they’re important mentally, to maintain brain plasticity and be subject to different stimuli. I don’t want to get early-onset dementia because I didn’t challenge my brain enough! Though writing a book is challenging, it’s challenging in one sphere: the language centres of the brain. I need to challenge the other sectors of my brain to better balance things out.
Maybe the key ingredient I’m missing is having fun. I like writing books and reading. I find it fun for me. And I realise that having time to write is a privilege that most people don’t have. But I need different sources of fun in my life, too. Maybe that’s another problem: I’ve made my activities into a strict schedule. For example, I have to go to the mountain three times a week and I want to go to the pool two times a week. But this schedule has developed from a “getting fit” perspective. A training perspective. Maybe if, instead of thinking about it as “getting fit,” I could think about it as “being outside doing something challenging.” Because most of the things I want to do for fun are physical activities.
As Charles Darwin wrote:
If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
I don’t want to end up like Darwin, regretting the things I could have done to maintain an interest in things outside of writing and thinking, “enfeebling the emotional part of [my] nature.” As my illness worsens, I realise I need to do things while I can instead of thinking I can just do them later.
I know it’s not New Year’s, but I resolve to do more fun things outdoors.
