While in full awareness that the above two strategies would have made for a fabulous experience in an unlikely place, I curiously chose not to invest.  In part, I chose instead to let myself be tired - after 8 months of actively engaging with life on the road, I wanted to take a break from the constant proactive energy it takes to live that fully in a foreign land.  But also, in part, I think I wanted to dabble in the dark arts, to know what an unhealthy unhappy retirement could feel like so I won’t actually go there.

I killed a lot of time.  After my two working roommates were off into the world, I’d clean the kitchen.  Read the New York Time news and do the games - adding Sudoku to the usual mix of Spelling Bee, Crossword, Wordle and Connections helped stretch that out to over an hour, or more if I followed a lot of the news links.  Then I’d choose one or two of the long-standing Things to Do (6 years of unfiled Canadian taxes, for example) and often spend an hour on hold with whatever bank or agency was “experiencing longer than usual wait times.” 

If these bland activities were stretched out enough - perhaps augmented by an outing to do a store return or charge the car - I could make it to lunchtime and know that another day was going to be successfully filled.  An episode of Shameless or Reservoir Dogs during lunch, then a good long nap, takes me well into mid-afternoon, after which it’s easy to fill the final hour or two with a book or a workout or another episode of some old show before the family returns.

Surprisingly - perhaps knowing it was a limited window - this didn’t depress me.  Energy went down, expectations went down, need for Fulfillment or Meaning went down. Bumbling and yawning through the days went I, content to not push or Strive.  After a lifetime of relentless ambition and purpose, I let myself float down the lazy river a spell.  I said above that Minnesota can provide quirk and curiosity; it is also the perfectly smooth and beige backdrop for a lazy hazy not-crazy summer vacation from Full Living.

I named this option “Wallow” because I was choosing to dip a toe into a depression-bound monotone.  But it could aptly be named “Fallow”, for like a field that’s been allowed to not Produce and feed the world for a season, I now find my soil ripe and fertile and ready to bloom again. This time two days from now we’ll be driving through Iceland with eyes, arms and hearts wide open and ready to once again embrace adventure.