Another Breath of Fresh Air

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

Life seems more hectic, frantic, and stressful than ever before. Not only do we have the usual worries about money, health, and our kids, but we also have additional anxieties concerning climate change, political extremism, mass shootings, raging pandemics, government dysfunction (maybe not such a new problem) plus cyberbullying, cybercrime, and the ubiquitous digital invasion of our privacy. Sometimes the entire world seems seem to be getting out of hand. Whether or not that’s true or if we are victims of our own neuroticism (perhaps fueled by elements of the media eager to grab headlines by emphasizing the worst possible scenarios), the truth is that the anxieties are there, and—to me at least—they seem to be compounding daily. At times they seem to add up to a constant internal buzzing, an annoying white noise of perpetual worry that—no matter what we do—never seems to go away. 

I recently took a trip to our family cabin in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. It’s a relatively secluded spot on a pristine lake that is still mostly surrounded by woodlands. There are maybe sixteen or seventeen other cabins there and much of the time they remain empty. The owners are probably too preoccupied to make it up there very often. There are busy times, like the Fourth of July or Memorial or Labor Day, but much of the time, surprisingly, it’s very quiet—and by quiet, I don’t just mean an absence of noise. 

If you let them, the woods and the lake will fill you with silence, and with it a tranquility that’s so profound it almost seems surreal. I first experienced this years ago when I had gone hiking into the deep woods with my younger brother. It was a sunny day, but we soon got so deep into the woods, it seemed like twilight. And silent. We couldn’t hear a thing. The further we went, the darker it got. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being watched. We started getting spooked. I looked at my brother and started making our way back a little faster than we had set out. There was nothing to be afraid of, I realized much later. The emptiness we saw and felt was not in the woods; it was in us.

On our latest visit, I went down to our pier just before sunrise one morning. The fog was rising in wisps of the mirror-like surface of the lake and the sky was growing gold and pink greeting the sunrise. The quiet of the woods and the water seemed to draw me out of myself and into the new day. It filled me with its sublime and satisfying emptiness. The birds were just starting to awaken and chatter, but even their songs seemed muted; perhaps they were filled with the sounds of silence, too. It wasn’t frightening this time; it was deeply and profoundly peaceful.

As children, my brothers and I had spent every summer vacation at our cabin, and while it was always around me, I was too filled with my own bravado and energy and self-absorption to really notice—except on the one occasion of the hike with my brother—the deep silence of the land around me. There were other times, like those nights we would lay on the pier and stare at a sky full of stars, a sky that seemed to expand exponentially the longer we stared at it, that I would begin to understand hints of the vastness beyond our experience.

I loved it up there as a youth, swimming, fishing, exploring, and all the rest of it, but the depths of the land’s majesty mostly escaped me. I was just too young and too dumb. The land and water were just backgrounds to my growing pains, my personal odyssey, and I chugged on and eventually grew up, got educated, found a job, got married, had a child, and bought a house. And on and on and on.

Absorbed and sometimes consumed with the strain of everyday anxiety, I came to the cabin less and less—I told myself I didn’t have time. When we did come up, it seemed as if the worries we thought we’d left behind had followed us up there. There always seemed to be something going wrong with the cabin. Plumbing problems, remodeling, electrical issues, pier rebuilds, and all sorts of other sundry chores seemed to consume us during our time away. When I did carve a little time out to go fishing, it seemed as if the resident anxiety transferred itself to ensuring we had a successful fishing trip. It just seemed like another place full of problems.

I retired recently and my wife and I took a trip up to the cabin to get away. We were a little nervous about leaving the house, but once the security system was set and we were sure the outside cameras were working, we heaved a sigh of relief and left. We arrived, unpacked, launched the boats, stocked the refrigerator, and—finally—kicked back to enjoy ourselves. 

And then, somehow, almost magically, I sensed a familiar serenity, something I hadn’t felt since I was a child, flowing through me like a fresh wind, emptying me of worries and anxieties. I wasn’t sure why or how it had happened. It wasn’t as if my worries had disappeared the moment I retired—quite the contrary. Things were as hectic as ever, but somehow this time, when the land spoke to me, I listened. For the first time in decades, I really listened, and I found everything else melting away. The constant buzz of anxiety and the cloud of worry that had seemed like perennial tenants in my mind had faded away and were replaced by a feeling a calm and tranquility as still as a mountain lake.

I wasn’t quite sure how or why these feelings had overtaken me, but the truth was I was enjoying it too much to care. I felt a sense of oneness, belonging, and fullness that I hadn’t experienced since my youth. As a child, the woods and the land had made an imprint on some part of me—subconscious or unconscious or somewhere else—but had been buried underneath the burden of modern life for years.

Like a breath of fresh air, when I came back to the cabin, I felt the land and the air and the water flow into me again, banishing the pedestrian life and filling me with a profound nothingness, a lack of demand, need, and worry that was slowly filled with the silence, stillness, and serenity of a world which existed eons before I was even considered. The fact that I can still somehow connect with it and understand the profundity and simplicity of its existence—and the insignificance of my own is, indeed, more than just a breath of fresh air.