One of my favorite things to do while staring out the window of the back seat of my family’s station wagon while on long road trips was to imagine that I, or a version of me, was swinging alongside the car, from electric pole to electric pole, as though I was spiderman. I could spend hours staring out that window watching, in my mind’s eye, this semi-embodied version of me, imagining myself out there, in the open air, swinging from pole to pole, actively propelling myself forward, through the air. There was a mesmerizing quality to it. The stability of those poles gave this imagined version of myself something to grasp onto, something to play off of, something outside of myself to keep me connected to the ground while simultaneously flying free.
Occasionally, we would find ourselves on a stretch of highway that didn’t have these poles. Sometimes in those moments, my swinging self would just disappear, but other times I would watch him land on the top of a Semi-truck, where he would rest until it was time to start swinging again.
One such drive that my family took during the summers was from New York to Cape Cod. There we would spend a week biking, eating seafood and ice cream, and playing in the bay. The Cape Cod Bay was an incredible body of water. Because of its particular geographic features it has one of the most extreme water level differentials in the world. At low tide the bay consists of miles of sandbars with nothing but ankle deep streams of water separating them. At high tide the bay fills in completely and the water comes over your head just feet from the shore.
One of my favorite things about being at the bay was watching the boats rise as the tide came in. These boats that just hours before were sitting flat on the ground would get lifted up and be floating, rocked gently back and forth by the evershifting water, held almost in place by their anchors. Anchors that once sat right next to them in the sand and were now digging into that sand keeping their boats from drifting away.
In some way these anchors are to their boats what those poles alongside the highway were to my imagined self. They offer, at the same time, grounding and space to float. They offer the chance to fly, to move freely, without concern that you will be left adrift.
As a person who moves around a lot, it has been important for me to set anchors for myself, to give myself some grounding so that I do not find myself adrift. These anchors take the form of places that I know and return to, people that I love and can hold me, and rituals that bring me back to myself, that I can come back to, that I can call upon if ever I start drifting a little too far. The security of these anchors gives me the courage to follow my curiosity, to disrupt the scripts that I might get stuck in, to drift enough away from what is known that I might experience and learn something new.
Sometimes the tides I find myself caught in are quite strong. In these moments my anchors might give a little more than I’m comfortable with, but if I’ve built them well, they will hold me just enough to weather the storms, and can be reset when the waters are once again calm.
I have been sick for the last three days and I was not able to write and post this piece according to the timeframe that I have been abiding by during the last twenty-six weeks of this ritual. But I was able to gather enough energy and brain power to write and post this today. The anchor that is this ritual got dragged a little bit, but in the end, it weathered this storm and kept me close enough to where I want to be.