It’s been a tough summer. For a whole bunch of reasons, the passage of the last few months has left me feeling tense and strung out, with a knot of gristle lodged in my chest that just wouldn’t let go. I wrote a while back about white space and the need for it, and this past weekend, I snapped.

Did you ever walk away and leave everything behind, even if just for a while? If not, I highly recommend it. My salvation came in the form of a tiny vacation house, tucked away in the brown velvet hills of White Salmon, Washington. You wouldn’t call it a nice place (bare minimum was more like it), nor was it quaint. It had three things I was desperately low on, however: a deck with sweeping views of the Columbia Gorge and Mt. Hood, scads of wildlife to watch, and quiet—delicious, enveloping, all-consuming quiet. It wasn’t until I heard true quiet that I realized how noisy my life had become.

For three short, blissful days, I did nothing but walk, eat, read, and write.  The first night, I sat on the deck in some of the inkiest darkness I’ve ever seen, and told stories to myself for hours. I thought about life, what had happened over the last forty-four years to bring me to this point, people I’ve known. One of the beautiful things about being completely alone was that I could just talk to myself out loud without worrying about cold stares or the men in white suits coming for me. Very freeing stuff.

My reading choices were Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates (my first JCO), and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a collection of Raymond Carver’s short stories. Both were inspired choices, but I missed one minor detail: Beasts is only 136 pages long. I finished it the first night I was there (hence the talking to myself), and by the second night,  I had devoured all the words I brought in with me. So, I was forced to make some of my own.

Like a lot of writers, I’m sure, life seems to conspire to keep me away from writing at every turn. Suddenly finding myself with time to write was a little confusing at first. As I got into it, trends emerged. To my surprise, I discovered that my natural rhythm seems to be writing in the afternoons and early evenings, a stark contrast with the early-morning scribblings I usually force myself into. Lacking the constant tick-tock of a schedule, I found that sometimes what I needed was an hour of just staring at the screen and zoning out before anything worthwhile would bubble to the surface. Bubble it did, though. By the end of my little getaway, I had added eighteen more pages to Last Thursday, more than I usually write in a week.

The moral of this story? Slow down whenever possible. On the drive home from White Salmon, I realized that it had been days since I felt tense, annoyed, or angry. Left to my own devices, I’m a laid-back, happy, generally content human being who actually enjoys writing. We often let the demands of life drown out those simple truths about ourselves, which is a shame. Now that I’m back on the grid,  the challenge is to find that calm center when I need it. Who knows, I might even find that part of me that used to enjoy blogging!