Hello, dear heart, and welcome.
At dinner with my family the other day, my nephew asked me, “If you could make one invention disappear without erasing the progress it enabled or the tools it inspired, what would you choose?”
Being silly, I blurted out, “Electricity.” Then I added, “Unicycles.”
I quickly told him I knew electricity wasn’t technically an invention before he could school me. We laughed, and he said he’d get rid of back scratchers.
Later that night, I lay on my patio staring at the bright, burning star Vega in the Lyra constellation, and I wondered why electricity had jumped out of my mouth. I realized I was craving simplicity, quiet, space, and the stars.
There was a time when I crewed on a 52-foot sailboat, leaving from the San Pedro docks on the Southern California coast and sailing to Catalina Island, about 22 miles away, if I remember right.
At anchor overnight, we took turns on anchor watch, two at a time, waking the next pair every hour or two to sit beneath the sky and make sure we didn’t drift. During the first few nights, I brought books with me: Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. But soon, I began leaving the books in my bunk and sprawling out across the cockpit cushions to watch the sky.
Off Catalina at two in the morning, the sky is nothing but stars. Empty spaces are hard to find. I watched them glimmer, leap, and glow, while shooting stars blazed across the darkness faster than I could think of wishes to pin to them.
Even at fourteen or fifteen years old, the glittering skin of the Cullen vampires couldn’t hold my attention like the real stars of the California night.
Sitting at the granite kitchen counter with my nephew, I wasn’t conscious of those memories. I didn’t realize how much I missed the lap of water against a boat hull, the quiet giggles of my friends, or the sound of silence blazing with starlight.
But it was in me.
The simplicity I craved was already there.
When I imagine electricity disappearing, my nervous system clenches. Smartphones turn into bricks, televisions become questionable wall art, satellites go dark, cars are stilled, and our modern life comes to a halt.
My body recoils because my inner electricity has oriented itself around the outer electricity, the technology that fuels my days.
I see the paradox. These tools, powered by electricity, occupy so much space in our lives in the name of simplifying them, and still, a part of me longs for simplicity enough to fantasize about turning it all off.
I have to laugh.
My mind loves binaries: yes or no, black or white, an electricity-free and simple life, or a fast, complicated, technologically forward one.
But my heart knows I don’t have to choose.
Elimination isn’t required for peace.
All it took was walking outside, lying down with a blanket, and gazing up at the Southern California sky again. Even in the middle of the city, with only a handful of stars visible, planes tracing bright lines overhead, a neighbor’s television drifting through an open window, and the city lights echoing against the night, I find peace.
I find simplicity in accepting the moment exactly as it is. I find it in allowing sweet memories to wash over me, through me, and beyond me. I find it in the temporal nature of life, right now.
And I find it in the truth that, no matter how this planet spins and my life spins with it, there is a part of me that always has been, always will be, and always is oriented toward stillness.
For just a moment, any moment, I can let myself feel that.
My sweet friend, I’ll meet you there.