On Getting Away from It All
Plus reflections on "How to Do Nothing" and my recent Sweden trip
In Jenny Odell’s amazing treatise on resisting the attention economy, How to Do Nothing, there’s an entire chapter called “The Impossibility of Retreat.” She describes the hazards of “getting away from it all” a la digital detoxification retreats in that, while inspiring in the moment, the escape from the world can be impossible to recreate in the everyday.
The chapter goes into those one-off getaway retreats, but also the 1960s and 1970s back-to-the-land movements that inspired hundreds of left-wing young people to protest society by getting away from it by building communes meant to live on the land. But the communes that sprang up from the movement didn’t last too long because, well, self-subsistence is much harder than it looks, especially for the unskilled. And for anyone who’s been on a retreat can know it can be exceptionally difficult to maintain the zen when having to deal with what to cook for dinner every night.
But also, more importantly, Odell’s point is that if the goal is to create a lasting change in the way you go about the world, one would need to integrate it into the day-to-day. And also, if one aspires to change the world, would getting away from everyone else actually achieve that? Odell writes this:
“There is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in the world. And yet, amid the debris of the present, escape beckons.”
This was all on my mind as I went on my own escape earlier this month. I spent two weeks in Sweden. Several days with my friend, Lindsey, and a group of newfound friends from across Europe on a kayaking, foraging, and cooking adventure with adventure company, Do The North. And another week just wandering the streets of Stockholm with my husband on our first extended vacation without our child since before I got pregnant with him in 2016.
Travel has always been a part of my identity, but traveling with a child has become a whole other endeavor in and of itself. Parents often exclaim: “there’s no such thing as a vacation when traveling with a child.” Because you’re still at the whims of a child’s schedule wherever in the world you are, you can never really get away from the practical needs of the everyday.
And while my son is a pretty chill traveler, nothing compares to having to only deal with my own needs and desires. We–especially parents–just sometimes need a break. And some of us go across the world for said break.
So when one of my new friends on my kayaking trip asked me as we were setting out from our lunch spot on one of the 6,000 tiny islands that make up Sweden’s Sankt Anna Archipelago “do you feel calm now?” that I realized I had been for several days by that point. It didn’t even take being in a kayak on the mirror-like waters of the archipelago to feel calm. The calm had set in a couple hours into my flight after all of the anxieties of trip preparation and child-schedule-organizing were officially behind me and I had the realization that I had no more immediate responsibilities.
I credit a lot of this to the distance between me and said responsibilities as well as the anti-anxiety medication I recently started.
This unprecedented zen feeling was maintained for the entire trip. Within that calm paired with being in a completely new place, I was able to notice my surroundings in a completely different way. Such as the deep greens of the moss on the glacier-carved granite in Sankt Anna, the consistent rustle of the aspen trees that give it the name “the quaking aspen.” And I was deeply intrigued by the naturalness of the hewn rocks in the Stockholm subway and even more so with the painted walls and ceilings that I noticed immediately despite being in a jetlagged haze.
I was also able to get up in the morning and take stock of just my needs and not some other tiny human’s. My husband and I were able to wander Stockholm without someone constantly complaining about his legs not working or refusing to walk one more step. And it was a break Cory and I desperately needed together because we had spent the last seven years working day-to-day to keep a child alive and our physical house intact and generally clean and sometimes you just need a reminder of what brought you together in the first place. It was a reset we all needed.
By the time we flew back home to Portland, I was ready to be back in the real world. But I thought a lot about how we can maintain that zen when we’re back in the onslaught of the everyday. And while the break did give me an appreciation for the routine of the day-to-day, I wasn’t really making any plans to keep myself in that zen when I returned. And almost immediately we found ourselves in the onslaught when Cory got Covid and we were back in the over-scheduled life of an American kid. And so just over a week back, I’m wondering how to maintain that zen I was experiencing. I shouldn’t have to go across the world to feel calm. And in relation to this project, I wonder if maintaining a consistent calm by way of resisting the attention economy is one form of climate action. It is, of course, capitalism that keeps us chugging along on this endless cycle of “to dos.”
Alas, I don’t have an answer. But I believe the answer is in some of the lessons Odell imparts in How To Do Nothing which most definitely doesn't have a prescriptive answer. It is in maintaining some kind of practice of attention to nature and the beauty of the life around us. In fact, while I was gazing up at the subterranean painted walls of the Stockholm Tunnelbana—which happens to be the longest art exhibit in the world—Stockholmers were scurrying around us, eyes straight ahead. It makes me think: just because you see it every day doesn’t mean it’s not amazing. So I wonder what are is my Stockholm-Tunnelbana-Art? What amazing thing do I not notice every day just because it’s always there?
As such, I believe it is noticing and appreciating the small things in the everyday. I can’t say I do any of that now or know how to do that, but it’s a goal that this particular reset has helped me find.
Stay tuned as I try to figure this out and tell me what you’re doing to “get away” without actually “getting away.”
p.s. also stay tuned for more on my trip to Sweden because it was a trip for this project and I have so much to say about it because it was truly amazing.