A Friendly Vacation

What if i spent my time with people as if i was was absorbing the moments on an exotic vacation? I’d hold my cup of tea in my hands and enjoy the lovely view into my companion’s soul. I feel the atmosphere could be as captivating as the lush green foliage in the rainforest where down below the cliff’s edge is a black lava sand beach and the ocean waves splash and play. Tropical birds call from the distance and a monkey howls its gibberish. With refreshing visits, the breeze is cooling and the conversation is a vacation. I could come away encouraged to face my own life.

   How can i be a refreshing vacation to others? I think it helps to have strong interests and joy in our work. Action and good energy are catching. It helps to read interesting books or listen to good podcasts. Share your interests and strive to find something in the other person that’s interesting and pull it out. If i try to be teachable while listening but also play the ball of conversation back, i think time with people can be enlivening and we can both come away encouraged.

   Sometimes, a stranger can walk through the door into your life and the view can be foggy, through the blur you glimpse a varied harsh landscape. Somewhere in these Saharan hills he’s traveled through, there will be random oasis’s of happiness and refuge. We had a visitor like that the other day, his speech did not flow and our conversation was basic but we know some of his life story and it’s been hard. He promised to come around again like he used to as he left. He was apologetic about not dropping in for the last few years but we’ve heard bits about the hardships he’s gone through from others. Life on a reserve is not easy and our nearest one seems to have extra challenges to overcome. This man brought up past years and good times he’d had in his youth working with a local farmer and his sons time after time. He kept asking after each of their names. It seems that connected him to something good and beautiful in his life, an oasis of connection, a sunny refuge.

  I am guilty of spending too much time distracted by my phone when i’m with my family. In an effort to minimize that, I put all my chats and social media into files years ago and I’ve just started to turn my phone screen filter to gray at tempting times of the day so it’s uninteresting to look at anything on my phone. I have to turn it back onto colour to look at art though. I want the colours i see to come from creation, not from my phone. I want to revel in the real hues of green in trees where needles shine warm golden green in the sun and dark blue green in the shade. I want to spot birds flying by out my window and the dog’s sparkly eyes as she begs to play. I want to catch the glimpse of the cows frosty breath as she breathes. I want to squint at the landscape and see how the violet grays of the tree line blur into pink at the edges.

I’m attempting to practice screen time fasts for reminders to be present. Help me out if you can. (now here i go typing on my phone at this minute.) I desire to be more present with my family and it’s too easy when I’m bored to pick up my phone and scroll through news or social media apps. I also can’t have games on any of my devices, i get way too addicted. It’s better if my screens are more dead than the lively scenes of reality all around.

   My full colour life shall be people and nature. February right now seems to be cold and the snow is packed deep and i am sick of winter but there are exotic lands to travel to all around me. There is an inventor building a town in the next room while he stirs through Lego to find the right pieces. There is a teen student who is drawing up ideal farmyards and windbreak shelters for a school course and in other places around our yard there is a rancher who loves purebred angus and knows the lineage of many cow families plus many other subjects. He is also a Bible scholar and is intrigued by psychology. Whatever he reads, he remembers, so we always have lots to talk about.  There is a shepherdess and artist in my house who is thinning out and growing taller. She abhorred those years when i felt she was adorably shaped. There is also a freckle faced dreamer and thinker who speaks a silent language with animals and is a hard teenager for me to read sometimes. The other day i was in town with my dreamer and as i worked through our list I said in frustration, “Everything in town always takes longer than i think it will.”

   “That’s the point when we’re together, Mom,” was her reply and I suddenly realized that to her all this driving and going into stores was not business, it was pleasure. It was quality togetherness.

I slowed down a bit and visited with her and looked at people in the stores after that. Did you know a high percentage of people go to grocery stores and restaurants mainly as a way to socialize? If I pause and move in a cheerful way through the people, i always find someone who just wants to visit. I discovered during Covid that i didn’t even like going into stores anymore because i felt trapped by not being able to see people’s faces. Maybe it was because i get claustrophobic quickly in tight spaces and couldn’t wear masks very long and also because people looked scared with masks on. I started timing myself at the grocery store to see how fast i could get in and out. At one grocery store the manager didn’t wear a mask so i’d go in there and make sure i talked to him because it was so nice to see a person’s face while visiting. I realize some people liked wearing masks and took refuge in the safety they felt with them on. I’m glad I had the opportunity to live through that stage to make me grateful for how interesting people’s faces are. Their smiles and greetings take us out of our own selfish boundaries and make us think about their lives. Maybe they have a small bit of cat hair on their jacket sleeves even though they’re dressed in brand name clothes and you realize they have a cat that they love and maybe they stopped to pet and talk to it before they left the house. It melts my heart a little if i observe people and think about how they live. I don’t usually get too awkward in conversation with them but i do try to catch their eye and say hi to give conversation a chance.

   A couple days ago, i bumped into the same guy over three times in my course through the grocery store. He was wearing strange blue glasses and kinda got all up in my business. He commented once that he never expected to see a Mennonite woman  buying cans of dry apple cider which is non-alcoholic. Maybe he thought it was alcoholic. I told him we loved it at our house.  He laughed. He noticed the rest of my cart full was just fresh produce. Then he told me all about his sparkling water juice he makes with a soda stream and infuses the drink with vitamins to sip on all day. He took off his blue glasses to pay at the till and i noticed one of his eyes stayed shut or was sewn shut. He talked all the way out the door. I don’t know what sort of vacation that conversation took me to but it definitely made me smile.

   Jordan Peterson says you can’t just judge someone about their lifestyle and then mess with their destiny by handing them advice. He recommends that you first ask them conversational questions and get to the answers together. Invest a little into them and they’ll invest in you. Judgement usually kills any chance at friendship. If i knew how to turn off that tap of judging others inside myself, i would. But i think it sort of comes naturally that we judge people, it’s because we’re judging ourselves at the same time. It’s basic survival as a human. But maybe if we can turn off judgement a little and seek to learn from others, we can draw out something good in each other. It keeps us humble.

  Maybe our visitor from his life at the reserve knows a lot more than us. He may not look successful but his life has thrown him curveballs that would have killed us long ago. Once i sat beside him in the x-ray room at the hospital. It was one of the best days of my life because i was there to see my baby in ultrasound. It was one of his worst days because he was there to get fresh knife fight wounds x-rayed. Why does life keep putting us together in maybe inconvenient ways? I think it’s so we both keep the door of understanding and growth open. Sometimes to grow, it has to get messy.

   I don’t know why i’m saying all my thoughts like this, i think it’s because it’s cold bleak February and i’d like to go on a sunny vacation but we have cows. The thought hit me that investing in people around me can be like a vacation.

Any vacation takes an investment. First it takes money, then it requires working ahead and next comes the long travel to get to the anticipated destination. Some locations take more effort to get to the sunny rest than others. Maybe there are long layovers and scarcity of available food. Maybe there isn’t any sleep for a couple days because you’re choring animals ahead. Once you get there to your vacation home where the patio is cool and shaded and the sun glints off the swimming pool in the yard, you set your luggage down and stretch. You eat, you rest, your activities feel like play even though you have to walk in the tropical heat to get to your taxi. You climb a mountain to see the highest view and attain sore muscles that feel so good. The new colours in the country astound you. The food is sensational. Everything awakens your senses and you explore for days.

   Now what if you were required to live in this country? That walk to the taxi is what you had to take to your job each day at 7. That dog who barks at you from the neighbours patio might chase you sometimes. You’d try to avoid climbing that mountain because the view to you looks dangerous. Well, you’d survive and find blessings as you adapted daily life.

   The people closest to you can feel like a chore sometimes. I think the way to get out of that mindset is do something with them and you’ll learn something refreshingly new about them. People are full of unexplored territory. They try to hide it sometimes because shame or politeness would like to keep walls up. Tear down walls and build bridges. I’m talking to myself here. There are walls up in my life that i’m chipping away at. Brene Brown says if you have one wall up, you will throw up others. You cannot keep it to just one wall. It’s like a constant work to keep the barriers down.

   If you’re bored with daily chores this February, this is just to let you know you can join me in the adventure of spending time with others. People are the real artworks in this life, they’re are the dream vacation destinations we can choose to travel to. Who knows what all we’ll learn?