Change of Pace
Last weekend I finally took a day off and went hiking in Pacific Palisades. I used to hike a lot of those trails in Santa Monica Mountains when I lived on the Westside. There’s really no shortage of great trails right in our backyard. I loved the fact that I could get to the beach or to those trails in short time any day. In Los Padres National Forest where I live, I also have abundant hiking trails literally in the back of my home though there’s not as many foot traffic in the mountains. I hardly see anyone on the trail when I hike there. But all that is beside the point. The point is I took a day off!
After the whirlwind of prepping, showing and negotiating the sale of the listing, it still took me several days to get caught up on emails, filing, paying bills, taxes (!!), and oh laundry, too. Now, I’m trying to get back to a some level of normal routine with some time for exercises, reading or journaling, most of which were out the window for the last few weeks. While there are still plenty of work to catch up with, I’m trying really hard to restore my routine.
In my 30s and 40s, I was working a lot for Japanese TV networks as a production coordinator. After doing the research, pre-production, making the travel arrangement for the crew, I would travel with the camera crew for days — often for a few weeks at a time. Once on the road, I was the driver, interpreter, interviewer, and a tour guide. I basically took care of the production crew from when we got up until we all went to our own hotel rooms after dinner, which made 12 to 14-hour work days. So it felt particularly precious to come home after the project is finished and get some time to recoup.
As I’m much older now, it obviously takes longer to recover from days of hard work. At the moment I’m savoring this slight change of pace from the intense period of work. Getting to the ridge on the trail where you can see the ocean merging with the blue sky, it made me gasp with a realization that, “Oh, I am here hiking.” Although it’s a simple awareness, after I had been running at full speed for some time, it was a refreshing moment. A moment when I came back to my body to know where I was. That’s called mindfulness. How simple…yet can be so elusive.