Walking and packing
The other day, I went for a walk and packed for a trip. The walk was real, the trip was fantasy, but both activities left me refreshed and renewed.
As I was walking, I made plans to travel to France to volunteer in a chateau, where I would exchange my hard work for room and board -- and the experience of a lifetime living in a castle, eating delicious food and enjoying the appreciation of my host (possibly an ex pat Brit) who would be in awe of how quickly I could dispatch a mess of weeds or tidy up an old shed or...whatever, it wouldn't matter. I was just enjoying my fantasy of packing.
After a while, I realized that, probably, a working holiday at a French chateau would occur off-season, so my linen should possibly be replaced with fleece and down. But that didn't deter me. I continued to pack my bag and day dream about the trip that, likely, will never happen. But. Who knows? Maybe it will.
And that is what brought me such contentment: The playing out of an enticing possibility that, in my mind, was, in the moment, very real.
By the time I arrived home, I had quite convinced myself that I had been on the trip, so vivid was my theoretical packing.
It made me remember something I had read about years ago. Prisoners during World War II fantasizing about food, precisely because there was none and they would get none, but fantasizing about it kept alive their hope that, one day, they would, again, have food. Delicious food. Succulent food. Nourishing food. And that hope is what keep them alive. [My clever mother, Anne, found me the reference for this when I could not: food fantasies.]
Call it what you will, but do not discount the value of a good fantasy about something that is, today, out of reach. COVID has killed so much and so many. Do not let it take your imagination or that flicker of hope in your heart and mind for what *will* be once again be in our future.
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Very inspiring text Amanda. It is fun to prepare a travel in our head ( real or fantasy).
ReplyDeleteReading you made me remember my days around Bordeaux and la Dordogne.
I admit I have to work on my imagination , I presently have difficulties to see post-Covid.
Beautiful! And what's exciting about this idea is that we are living during times that reveal the science of what it actually means to create our future. A shift in our inner world generates waves of possibility in our external world. So, my dear friend, I fully expect you will be in France and I now imagine that I will join you there in that glorious castle to drink fine vino, enjoy nourishing food, and engage in wonderful conversation! Let us pack! For we must first SEE it to believe it ... NOT the other way around. Or as Dr Joe Dispenza says: "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
ReplyDeleteBravo! Nice work.