Rebecca and I just returned from a week on Madeline Island, one of a group of 22 Apostle Islands, in Lake Superior, off the coast of northern Wisconsin. Decorah friends Steve and Katie Sheppard provided an accommodation that offered us the chance to bike, hike, read and relax.
Sitting comfortably in Steve and Katie’s cozy kitchen in Madeline’s home away from our homes in Clarinda and Decorah, and inspired by the sunrise over Michigan Island on most mornings, I got to thinking about travel and routine, the yin and yang in the title.
Merriam-Webster defines yin and yang as “opposite sides, elements or extremes.” For me, travel is a yin or a yearning to see and experience new places. Routine is the yang to travel’s yin, an equally strong urge to set up a daily structure, especially in new places. Not everyone needs to balance their travel-yin with a routine-yang, in fact, some would find the two yearnings contradictory. Yet each sits comfortably, if a bit leery of each other, inside me. Walt Whitman in Song of Myself expresses it this way.
I love the “I contain multitudes” phrase. It gives me permission to accept my own contradictions. These contradictions, once they are seen and accepted, can productively work to balance each other.
On our first night on the island, with a glass of wine (Rebecca) and gin and tonic (me) in hand, we sat down to plan out our five days. Biking, hiking, and eating were easy, and routine. Rebecca then threw out the idea of kayaking. “In Lake Superior!” I exclaimed, finishing-up my G & T in one slurp. All of a sudden the comfortable balance between my travel-yang, a new place, and my routine-yin, doing things I was confident about, was disrupted.
A KAYAK STORY
Seven years ago – the year is etched in the yin part of my brain – Rebecca talked me into kayaking for the first time. We choose a local, favorite kayaking spot, the Root River, in Lanesboro, Minnesota, 35 miles north of Decorah. But first…
A BRIEF EXCURSION TO CHILDHOOD
I have always had a love – hate relationship with water, another yin and yang. Do you remember your first childhood memory? Mine is at 4 years old being thrown into Davenport, Iowa’s Fejervary Park pool during my first swimming lesson and sinking to the bottom of the pool. My mother’s version of the story was the instructor got fed up with my many tentative approaches to the water and finally just took matters into this own hands, along with me! Ten years later my Davenport Assumption High School science teacher, Don Jepsen, who would go on to become one of Iowa’s most successful swimming coaches, asked me to go out for Assumptions’s first-ever swimming team, and I said a yang-yes. Now…
BACK TO THE KAYAK STORY
As I maneuvered my kayak behind Rebecca’s into the Root River, I remember thinking ‘how hard can kayaking be?’ Not knowing what I did not know, I figured paddle left and then paddle right, yin and yang, and this worked for about 10 minutes. And then I lurched too far left and all of a sudden I am under the kayak in about five feet of water. 20 minutes later I have gotten the kayak upright drained of water and I am back in business, for about five minutes.
Protecting my left flank, I lurch too far right, and I am again under the water. Rebecca is 500 yards ahead helplessly watching all of this and, as she would say later, and confirmed a few years ago by our Decorah Off the Driftless kayaking guide, “I didn’t know anyone who had overturned a kayak.” Little did I know at the time, I was fast becoming the world’s foremost expert on flipping over a kayak.
I have kayaked three or four times since that first misadventure, with no mishaps. But anything in the water is still outside my comfort zone, never a comfortable part of my routine. So I balked at Rebecca’s kayaking suggestion, unwilling to fit it into our comfortable routine. This part of me, what I have designated the yang, is the part that says ‘no’ or ‘stop.’
YIN AND YANG LESSON FROM MADELINE
Travel, or what I have labeled yin, is a way of saying ‘yes’ to the world. Unhooked from one’s comfortable routines, travel can remind us of the tyranny of those routines. I need travel and other reminders to live life to its fullest. Maybe something else works for you. The yang part of me, apparent even at age 4 and that first swimming lesson – tentative, scared, passive, prudent, reticent, passive, seeing the world as too big – willing to settle into routine, requires a yin to yank me to the world outside my comfort zone.
What are your yins and yangs? Are they in balance?
That is the lesson I took from Madeline Island. The next time Rebecca suggests kayaking I will say YES. Unless it is on the Chattoga River, the river location for the 1970 film Deliverance.
