It’s snowing outside, but I am thinking of Mexico.
My next book will be about the foods of northern Mexico, a project I have been working on for years, but from which I strayed last year. Last summer I was in a good place: Priorities clear, things in their proper order, plugging away. I spent two weeks in Baja Sur working on my Spanish and researching the food.
But then came fishing in Alaska, buying a home, grouse camp, settling in. As autumn progressed, my life spiraled in a direction I had not expected. Very high highs, very low lows. It was a wild ride, one I do not regret. Maybe it was necessary, maybe just fate.
The new year is as good a marker as any to stop, breathe, assess where you are — and then correct your course if you’ve gone astray. Maybe you gave short shrift to someone important to you: kids, spouse, friends. Maybe you found yourself picking up bad habits. Or stared too closely at trees while the forest around you began to burn. Maybe you too had a project you set on the shelf.
Time to pick it up. Or put it down. Time to cool an overheated relationship, or to stoke the fires of one you let chill to an ember. Time to recenter.
What that looks like for me is, at the beginning, to slow the hell down. A lot.
I get seasonal affective disorder, so the short, gray, cold days here in Minnesota affect me far worse than they did at this time of year in Sacramento. My bedroom is a dark sanctuary, one where rising can require effort. Some mornings, I just let myself linger. Some evenings, I turn the lights out before ten.
I cannot recenter without rest. Few can.
Once rested, I require quiet. Silence, or at least limited distractions, lets me move mental boxes around in my brain, rearranging them Tetris-like in ways that I at least think will help me move forward. This, I know, is a luxury for many. My life is, largely, my own. Not so for many others. Got kids? Good luck with that whole silence thing.
But even a few hours snatched in early mornings or later at night help immeasurably.
I can’t tell you how many times I am working on a problem in my head, chewing and tasting and rolling it around, almost there, almost there… when a phone notification or shiny object obliterates my progress. Damn. Quiet cures that.
For me, specifically, I needed to start arranging more solo trips to Mexico. I’ll be honest: I have been nervious about simply flying out to some non-tourist destination in a part of Mexico where sometimes Bad Things Happen. I’d been trying to go with people, ideally Mexicans, as a sort of safety net. But that just isn’t going to happen. So solo it is, at least for the most part. Buckle up, buttercup.
I’ll be in Baja again at the end of this month, then Chihuahua in February. Not sure where I will go in March, but somewhere — maybe Tijuana, or Nuevo Leon, maybe Saltillo? April will be Sonora, then a “blue highways” road trip along the border from Nogales to Laredo. Once the weather gets too hot, back to Minnesota to write.
The reason for all the travel is obvious: I am not Latino. I didn’t grow up in Mexico. So writing a book like this requires an enormous amount of effort: learning, talking, experiencing, book research, the lot. I spent 18 years as a journalist, so I am skilled at gathering and synthesizing information. But I need to put boots on the ground more. I have traveled extensively in northern Mexico, but for this project, you can’t go too many times. And, well, it’s a lot nicer in Baja in February than it is in St. Paul.
Many times the solutions to our dilemmas lie within easy reach — you just hadn’t noticed them before. Or, you already had solved them, but the whirlwind of life swept those solutions out of your mind. Maybe you hold the moon in your pocket, but when you shot for the stars and failed, you forgot to look there, forgot the value of what you had close to you, all along.
I really wanted to just spend a winter in Mexico, immersing myself in todas las cosas. But I realized that would be irresponsible to the rest of my life, and I started to question this entire project. (Not rational, just telling you what was going through my mind.) But, after that quiet, that recentering, I realized that I can bounce back and forth and get pretty close.
The snow has slowed here. So have I. So should you. Rest. Restore. Reconnect. Recenter. Before you know it, it will be February, and things happen in February.
Had -38 centigrade here last week and that slowed everything down regardless of previous plans. But beyond that thank you for a fine piece on one of the most important aspects of creativity and productivity.
Very LOL.... One Vast Nothing All Things Potentially