Sometimes, the Difference Between Hope and Despair is a Good Night's Sleep

I'm talking with my students this week about life lessons learned, and I share with them something I once heard and stand by:

Sometimes, the difference between hope and despair is simply a good night's sleep.

Today, as I worked from home, dragging in several ways both physical and mental, I remember this wisdom. I haven't been sleeping well at night, and I've felt off. I'm cranky. Decisions are harder to make. Small issues — like Google telling me that my Gmail storage is 100% full, or my repeatedly inability to figure out the school district's new app that's supposed to "streamline" communication, whatever that means — feel like impossible problems to hurdle, rather than simple tasks to complete.

How am I even an adult? I moan, while wandering my house looking for chocolate.

That's when I remember the adage about a good night's sleep. And, a minute later, that's when I decide to take an afternoon nap. I rarely nap, unless I'm miserably sick, but on a day when I was on the verge of feeling miserably blah, it seemed like the right thing.

As I slipped under the covers, I melted — melted, I tell you — into the bed. Everything that was wrong felt much less wrong, and for a blissful hour, I slept. I woke feeling refreshed, like I had been rebooted.

It reminds me of the story of Elijah in the Bible when Elijah was so downcast that he wanted to die, and — I paraphrase here — God is like, "Take a nap, eat a snack." 

Sometimes, the difference between hope and despair really is that simple.

Let August Be August

August: a month that starts with humidity and ends with college football. In between, it's filled with everything and nothing, a month that languishes and races, a month that looms large in import and recedes in any semblance of daily structure until the very end, which is when you're practically smacked upside the head with daily structure.

If August were a specific time and day, it would be Sunday evening. Technically, it's still summer, but in your bones you know you're staring down the end of things. You know the other shoe will drop, that hazy days won't linger forever, that school busses and football games and parent-teacher conferences and increasingly early sunsets are near.

But now that I'm at the end of it, I'm not entirely certain where August went. Oh, I did stuff, alright. I finally cleaned my garage of remnants from a garage sale that took place in July. I touched up the dings on the exterior doors with fresh paint. I made a dozen zucchini bread one afternoon from one giant zucchini — mammoth, really – that resembled one of those fat, oversized plastic wiffle ball bats that, if you connect just right, it would carry the ball deep into your neighbor's yard, if not your neighbor's neighbor's yard.

I drove kids back and forth to various places, and back and forth again. I read books, and went to garage sales on Friday mornings, and watched reruns of Brooklyn 99, and cut the grass, and talked with neighbors, and gathered with friends, and moved our oldest daughter into her first college apartment, where I sat on the floor with a screwdriver assembling the legs back onto the old wooden kitchen table we bequeathed to her. I received — and largely ignored — no fewer than 172 emails from my younger two children's school. I took regular evening walks and listened to crickets get louder as the month plodded along.

Like a responsible adult, I also squeezed in a few doctor's appointments. As the semester encroached in earnest, I met with colleagues, visited my classrooms, attended all my department's orientation meetings, formatted my syllabi, and published my Canvas classes. The semester officially started yesterday, so I've tenuously memorized all my students' names through a repetitive, yet highly effective, ice breaker that I've been doing on the first day of semesters for eons. Hopefully I'll remember most of those names tomorrow.

August isn't as quite as tricky as it once was when our kids were little. They've now experienced many starts of many school years themselves. Even though it's a draining process regardless of age, their ages allow them to take it in stride. Everyone, it would seem, is growing up.

Even so, August, somehow, remains a month fit for childhood nostalgia, if you let yourself lean into such things. It feels like a month where you'd sit on a porch swing, sipping sweet tea and watching the lightning bugs blink their Morse code into the dark, and you'd soak it all in because soon enough, you know, summer will be over.

Hiking in Utah, Knowing Nothing, and Packing the Perfect Book

My family just returned from a trip out west to hike Utah's "Big Five" national parks and visit the Grand Canyon. To be transparent, even though my husband had researched this trip for months, leaving dozens of internet tabs open to articles titled "Seven Sights You Must See in Arches National Park," I didn't know anything about any of these locations until we arrived. I just showed up.

He, a competent adult, planned our itinerary, booked our plane tickets, secured our rental car, improvised a revised plan when our flight from Philly to Vegas was abruptly cancelled minutes after we arrived at airport, and guided our family through the City of Brotherly Love for an afternoon of impromptu sightseeing, even though it was an obscenely humid 90+ degree day and I not only witnessed a man with his pants down, but also a woman yelling and washing her feet in the sink of a public restroom at Reading Station, which also is where we ate an obligatory Philly cheesesteak for lunch before returning to the airport later that evening for our hastily re-booked flight.

Our family has traveled before. We visit my parents in Florida on alternating spring breaks. Each June we spend a week with my husband's family at the shore — a tradition that started when our three kids and their cousins were still kids, whereas now almost all of the "kids" have their drivers licenses, apply their own sunscreen, and stay up later than the adults.

During these trips, every one of them, we've driven to our destinations. We've never flown, even on the nearly 1,300 mile trip from central Pennsylvania to the Gulf Coast, even the time we had to stop at seven different restrooms in the state of Florida alone because our youngest had chugged a 24 ounce Gatorade at the start of the trip. We pack our minivan until it sags with Joel's golf clubs, beach chairs, an umbrella, suitcases and duffel bags with more clothes than we need to pack (just in case), and an assortment of snacks — canisters of Pringles, Snickers minis that inevitably melt in the heat, and a sharable size bag of Twizzlers cherry nibs. It's food we otherwise try to limit, but it somehow seems perfectly acceptable to eat at 10 AM while on vacation. 

I also bring a tote bag of books. Five, six, seven books, at least. If I'm on vacation, I'm going to read. Our minivan operates like Hermione Granger used an undetectable extension charm on it; somehow everything fits. I'm never concerned that I'm taking too many books. It isn't a problem if I don't like a book or if I don't feel like reading a particular book at that particular time on that particular trip. I always have loads of other books to choose from my tote bag.

But you can't bring a tote bag of books when you're traveling by plane and rationing three suitcases for five people. You need to strategize.

This is why I'm happy to inform you that I made the exactly right choices with my reading selection for our trip west. It comprised of only three books. One was a devotional. The next was a romp-of-a-romance novel titled Read Bottom Up, which is entirely told through email exchanges between the new couple and the emails each of them send to their best friends about the relationship. (As someone who's closing in on 23 years of marriage, which is the same amount of time I was single, it's been a small eternity since I experienced the dating scene. Scratch that. I never really experienced the dating scene like this novel's protagonists experienced it, yet I still happily idled an hour and a half, poolside, following their emerging romance from cover to cover.)

The final book I brought — It Was An Ugly Couch Anyway by Elizabeth Passarella — is the type of book I want to have written. While packing, I bent its front cover and marred its new-book perfection, but the crease now seems fitting. When I love a book, I dog ear pages to mark especially delicious sentences or paragraphs. This book is now riddled with dog ears, inviting me to revisit sections that resonated so deeply as if her very thoughts had been lodged inside my own head surrounded by marble, and she somehow carved away the surrounding stone to bring the ideas to life, much like Michelangelo is known to have stared at the slab that eventually would become David and chip away at everything "not David" until his shape took form.

Elizabeth — perhaps I'm being bold to use her first name, but in my mind she and I are now friends — wrote about daily life past and present, about writing, about living and moving with three kids in New York City, about starting to run as a 43-year-old, about marriage, about chin hair, about her mother-in-law, about parenting fails, about faith, and about her dad accidentally running her over with their station wagon while on a family vacation to a lake in Arkansas.

You might ask, "Robin, does that content warrant a Michelangelo reference?"

I'd argue that, yes, I think it does. Her words and phrasings carve out and elevate ordinary experiences in ways that perfectly capture human likeness.

I haven't yet finished the book because I'm torn between bingeing and savoring the remaining two chapters. Her writing not only has delighted me, but it's also inexplicably helped me. I'm a person who has words inside of me, but when I have too much to say or when life circumstances create heavier thoughts I reckon I can't say — which on-again/off-again is the case — those words get dammed up. Then I say nothing, at least not publicly.

The words within me might get released in different ways. Steam has to vent somehow. I'll have a three-hour phone call with my closest friend. I'll inconveniently wait until my husband has said goodnight and there's been a perfect beat of silence where his breathing has stabilized into an optimal pre-sleep rhythm, at which point I'll feel an urge to launch into a spoken dissertation. Or I'll write sprawling, unedited journal entries just for myself.

But words for real audiences? When life itself heats up, those words get relegated to a back burner, and eventually the pilot light gets snuffed out. I figure I have nothing to say.

As I read Elizabeth's essays, though, fresh ideas surfaced. Words clanged against each other into thoughts and images and concepts. I stood in the hotel shower washing my hair (the hotel conditioning shampoo, surprisingly, offered an acceptable level of conditioning, unlike any other combined shampoo-and-conditioner I've ever used), and ideas poured through my mind like rivulets of water down the drain. In the process, pieces of me felt like they were thawing, pieces that have been stuck for a while.

Perhaps hiking in the Utah heat also helped. Every day neared, if not exceeded, 100 degrees. People will be quick to note that it's a dry heat, and they're not wrong. The humidity was nonexistent. If I hadn't hiked miles each day, I would have had amazing hair days, even using the two-in-one hotel shampoo and conditioner. But we did hike miles each day — beautiful hikes over beautiful spaces that looked so foreign from my familiar central Pennsylvania landscapes that I questioned whether I was in the same country. Even on the same planet.

As we hiked, we alternated who carried the backpack Joel had purchased on Amazon the week before our trip. I felt like an imposter, much like when I stroll through a city and suspect everyone I pass instantly can discern that I'm not from there, that I don't fit in LA, or DC, or Atlanta, or Philly, or anywhere urban at all. In Utah, it felt the same, just opposite, as I passed people who looked like they were born hiking, while I haven't eaten enough granola in my entire life to belong. I don't even own a pair of Chacos.

Weeks before we arrived, Joel researched the hikes we'd take because, as I mentioned before, he is an adult. During our first hike in Zion, I marveled at the switch-backed roads and the one-hundred-year-old tunnel stretching over a mile through the imposing mountainside, a tunnel that had been planned and excavated with limited technology, while, in contrast, I had struggled to squeeze the hardened toothpaste from my travel-sized tube that morning.

Don't even get me started on the embarrassing admittance that if you had pulled me aside at gunpoint before this trip and demanded, "Grand Canyon, Utah or Arizona?" I might have died. It really would have been up to a coin toss. This trip highlighted my recurring insecurity that while I'm smart in a few select areas, secretly, I remember nothing and don't know how to do anything.

(For the record, if you personally can relate to this, the Grand Canyon is in Arizona.)

So, in this spirit of not feeling especially competent with basic geographic knowledge, trip-planning aptitude, civil engineering skills, or even toothpaste excavation, I hiked. Each day, the five members of our family hiked up and down hills, around cliffs, through craggy holes, and over boulders. Our steps were punctuated by Joel's frequent and fatherly admonishment to stay "six feet plus one good stumble" away from the edge at all times. The phrase became a mantra of sorts.

Each hike felt similar to life — detours and twisted ankles, different paces and preferences, occasional bad attitudes and complaints, spectacular views with appreciative silences, mild vocalized irritations that someone could hear "everyone breathing" as we climbed, lengthy flat stretches and boring stretches and hot stretches, hard passages where steep uphill slants caused your quads to burn and your heart to question if you should continue or if the journey was stupid and you didn't have what it takes to finish. At one point, I swapped out my size 7.5 sneakers for my 14-year-old's size 6.5 sneakers because her toes were "rubbing funny." For a particularly unpleasant half-mile stretch, the younger two bickered about who should explain the plot of a movie to the family. (Mind you, neither of them had fully watched the movie, but both apparently felt strongly about summarizing it.)

Yes, hiking was parallel to life, to this cumbersome journey of parenting three teenagers, which is its own version of steady plodding, hard trails, questioned sanity, pinched toes, ordinary irritations, headaches, heartaches, and the occasional breathtakingly spectacular view that makes you feel like the hard parts are worth it.

As I sweat under the relentless Moab sun, I breathed in the dry desert air and the sandalwood fragrance of Old Spice Swagger because I was sharing bodywash with my husband (see: limited suitcase space). Thoughts that had been lodged in my head started to dislodge, shaken loose with each breath, each step, and each chapter that I read by the hotel bedside lamplight at night, reveling in Passarella's perfectly rendered, keenly detailed, ordinary life observations.

We've been home for a few days now. My eyes have grown accustomed Pennsylvania's greenness, which I had missed after ten days of western reds and browns. I've viewed with fresh eyes the remnants of my pre-life trip — familiar objects and rooms and streets that become so familiar when you're living in them they're nearly invisible.

Sometimes, I suppose, you momentarily have to step away to see what typically surrounds you with greater accuracy. And sometimes you have to read someone else's stories and thoughts to help jumpstart your own.

Like Hitting Your Head Off a Brick Wall

I hit my head off a brick wall today. It was purely accidental and quite embarrassing. Let me back up to set some context. 

I was slightly behind on my way to work this morning, so I walked quickly from my parking garage to my classroom building. I wasn't late. I simply was on the cusp of not being early, and since I didn't want to be late I sped up my pace even more in the last stretch, finding a seldom used entrance that leads to a back stairway near my classroom.

This is where things get murky. As I reached for the door handle, my foot caught on an upturned corner of the entrance's commercial-grade rubber door mat, and I tripped. Since I was carrying a bag and water bottle, I had nothing to break my fall. I smacked my head into the brick wall, then I realized I was laying on the ground.

I walked into class three minutes late.

With my head throbbing, I hadn't noticed that my knee was scuffed and bruised, and I was further surprised when a student asked, "Woah, what happened to your elbow?" Suddenly I became aware of that part of my body, too. It was bleeding.

None of the injuries seemed overly serious, though, so after explaining the embarrassing encounter and getting my bearings, I ran the class as usual. 

Partially through the session, one student quietly got up to leave the room. I thought little of it, until he came back a few minutes late holding a CVS bag, which he handed to me.

He had ordered a box of Band-Aids and Door Dashed them to our building. Let me repeat this:

He had ordered a box of Band-Aids and Door Dashed them to our building. When he left our classroom, it wasn't to use the restroom or water fountain, but rather to meet and pay the Door Dasher outside.

Class stopped. Students clapped for him and this extraordinarily kind gesture. I nearly teared up, and I'm pretty certain it's not even because I might be concussed.

You see, over the past few days, I've left campus feeling discouraged. Attendance has been spotty in one of my classes, and that's extremely unusual for me. Even though I mentally know that college students are responsible for themselves, their actions, and their attendance, I've felt like I'm failing.  

Then I go and hit my head off a brick wall, walk into my classroom with a bloody elbow, and get a gift of Door Dashed Band-Aids and so much compassion from my students that I realize maybe, just maybe, summer classes are actually going just fine.