Cold water in the morning and the ghost of a cigarette
An extended early morning meditation before I start my next editing marathon
This is going to be one of those two–half days, where I get on with it much earlier than I should, sleep for a few hours when I reach a stopping point, then get up and get on with the rest of my day and go late into the night.
I have these days, every now and then, when the life of my mind wants to get living before my body thinks it’s a very good idea. When my mind gets going consistently enough, it can convince my body to do things but nobody else thinks it can – or should. They have a point, but my mind has its own ideas.
I was up late last night, reading, thinking, ruminating. I think I headed to bed a little bit after midnight, and I have no idea what time I actually got to sleep. And then this morning, I was just awake 10 minutes before five, just… Awake. Couldn’t help it.
And now I’m here, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, ready to wash my face in cold water, as I do every morning, brush my teeth, and go make myself a cup of coffee.
There are words waiting for me in the next room, written on paper, sitting in online documents, paused in word processing files on my laptop. I’ll get to them in a bit.
The cold water on my face feels familiar, yet a little disappointing. It’s late October, and it feels like the water should be colder. It is tap water, after all, I remind myself. But then I think back to the 20 years I lived in a house with a well. The cold water was always cold there. I miss having a well.
I started washing my face and cold water about three years ago, as a recovery technique to recalibrate my nervous system. As a daily marker to anchor my frayed-to-breaking system in something simple, daily, grounding, mildly shocking, ever-present. I had gone through what is politely referred to as “a hard patch“, which probably almost killed me… but I was so busy taking care of what needed to be done, that I barely noticed. The point is, I survived. The point is, I did more than survive. I slingshotted around that prolonged episode of requisite misery like the Cassini space module slingshotted around earth on its way to whatever planet it was flying off to visit.
When the Cassini flyby was getting set up, back around 1998, I think, a lot of people were concerned that was going to crash into the Earth. I think a lot of people were worried about me crashing, too, but in both cases it didn’t happen. I limped along for a couple of years, with varying degrees of functionality, but I did slingshot around, and now I’m headed off to somewhere that’s probably not visible to human eyes, but is marked on a map somewhere… If you know where to look.
The whole point of washing my face and cold water is to balance out my autonomic nervous system. I’ve read that it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is incredibly helpful, if not requisite, after you’ve been in fight–flight–freeze mode for more than “a little too long”. It’s one of those things I found that would center me every morning, give me a minor challenge to overcome, and also wake me up in a way that first jolted then smoothed out my system.
Kind of like having a cigarette—without the smoke, looking around for an ashtray, or paying so much for a pack. 35 years ago, I smoked. I’d started years before in high school, quit, picked it back up in college, and kept going – half heartedly making my way through a pack a day, but without the durable will to quit… Until conditioned myself out of the habit ‘round about USA election day, 1990. It didn’t take long to quit. All I did was put my pack of smokes and my lighter and my ashtray near the head of my bed, and every morning, as soon as I woke up, I would smoke one cigarette after another, as fast and as hard as I could, until I made myself so violently ill I either wanted to throw up or I did throw up. It generally took about three or four cigarettes, smoked in rapid succession – and I mean rapid – to do the trick. And by the time I was standing green and nauseated in front of the bathroom mirror, I was pretty much done with my craving for the rest of the day. As I recall, it took three or four days of that hellish morning routine, lying on my stomach, sucking in smoke as fast and as hard as I could, before the very thought of picking up a cigarette made me feel like throwing up.
It worked. In 35 years, I think I’ve “cheated” maybe twice… but every now and then, I could really go for a cigarette. My sister and her husband smoke. The woman who’s staying with them smokes. Sometimes, when I’m visiting, I would really like to join them for their after-dinner pause out on their screened-in back porch. But there’s something about the visceral memory of being belly down with a lit ember at my fingertips, glowing its way fast towards me, my whole body filling with nicotine and everything else in those “coffin nails” as my German friends once called them, that makes me think again. So, I stay inside and check my phone, while the smokers do their thing.
My thing is this morning routine, running the water to get it as cold as it can, and then washing my face thoroughly with five handfuls of water, my fingers held close, palms cupped, getting that little jolt of almost-coldness onto my still-sleepy skin.
I can’t remember the last time I didn’t wash my face in cold water, as soon as I got up.
Of course, the experience now is very different from how it was when I first started… how I kept things going through those long New England winters. I used to own a house at the edge of a clearing that backed up to woods covering a tall hill in the back. There was an ancient deer path that angled down that hill, and every year I got to see if the local herd of whitetails was five or seven or nine or 13. I’ve heard that some deer trails can be hundreds (even thousands) of years old, if they’re left undisturbed. I always wondered how many generations of deer had grown up, trudging up and down that path.
The place where I used to live had been built into land that was everyone assumed would stay conservation land… until 1972. Apparently, that’s the year that everything in town fell apart and started going downhill. At least, that’s what the few locals who were still left told me. Other locals from surrounding towns told me that they hadn’t been back to my neighborhood since the early 70s, because my road was the one that the town always shut down on snowy days in the winter, so the kids could sled the hill and the adults could ski. Once they built the houses, there was no point to come back again. The pain of that lasting loss still showed for them. They must have grown up sledding and skiing past the place where my house used to sit.
When I was still there, I often started my days on that deck, looking back to the hill, facing east, watching for the sun peeking through the trees at the top. Watching for the deer, the chipmunks, the squirrels, listening for the pileated woodpeckers, blue jays, phoebes, hawks… and keeping an eye or an ear out for any other wild creatures that were passing through. Those little critters, the voles and moles, the raccoons and skunks and possums… the fox and coyote. Once, in the next town over, I saw two huge wild canines lope across the road at dusk. They were nobody’s pet, and they didn’t have the same kind of trot as a coyote. Friends of mine farther west from where I lived swore that they heard wolves howling at night, and I believe them. Of course, nobody talked about them much, at least not publicly. As with rattlesnakes, somebody was likely to get a gun and go remove them, if they knew where they could find them.
I never saw a wolf from my deck. I saw plenty of other things, especially red tailed hawks that tended to treat my birdfeeder like a buffet. Sharpies, Cooper’s hawks, and every now and then a bald eagle overhead. It was quiet back there. Very quiet, very private, more or less, depending on how curious the neighbors were. But they were only two of them who had a clear line of sight to my back deck, and only one of them was a problem.
When I realized splashing cold water on my face would balance out my autonomic nervous system, I put a galvanized metal pail out on my deck. I set up a big chunk of unsplit firewood on the edge of the deck facing east, and I put my pail on top. I filled it with cold water from my tap, which was water from the ground, since I had it well. I let it sit there. I left it out, exposed to the elements, open to the sky overhead, changing it out every few days… or sooner, if something fell in that didn’t need to be there… just letting it be water in an open pail in the open air.
When it got cold in the fall and then in the winter, I let it freeze. The best days were when I went out and found an eighth of an inch of ice across the top. I’d give it a good punch with my fist, break a hole big enough for me to get both hands in, and then wash my face on that, five splashes with a good rub. Bracing.
I miss that. I miss the bitter cold, the bite of it, first thing in the morning, the cold of the hard ice on my knuckles, the shock of it on my face, and the wondering if there wasn’t something in that water that might make me sick, might infect me, might get into my eyes or my ears or my nose or my mouth, and lead to one of those weird little medical dramas that end with me being “taken too soon“.
What a strange world we live in, that the simplest things can seem so perilous. How odd, that I’ve been trained to scan for danger at every turn, calculate risks and benefits as a reflex, my brain constantly calculating the trade-offs about what’s worth it or not… hesitant to do the simplest things that my great-grandparents thought nothing of.
My grandmother laughed at me once for being reluctant to eat an entire apple, including the core. She told me the core was the most important part, so I ate that too, as she watched. She never watched me eat an apple again. I’m not sure if that was accidental or intentional on my part. I didn’t much care for the seeds or the rough little shells of the seed pockets. But I can’t say that I’ve eaten an entire apple at least once in my life. So there it is.
An hour and a half has passed since I first woke up. The coffee is good and hot, the memories mean something, and I’m asking myself why I don’t just set up another bucket of water on my deck in the place where I live now. I haven’t done it in the past two years, because the outdoor cats come around, and chances are they wouldn’t be able to resist messing with my water. I suppose I could cover it. That could work. Put a board and a rock on top, and just not worry about it. And then every morning, I can get up, walk out, and do my morning routine.
I think I know where that galvanized bucket is. I should find it and set it up… or just go get myself a new one. Or use one of the many containers that I already have. I bought this house fully furnished, and the guy who sold it to me had an extremely well appointed kitchen. I don’t have to look far to find a large enough container for water to wash my face. And there’s a sort of symmetry to using one of the new containers – well, new to me, anyway – for this place I’ve been in for two years.
Then again, there would be some nice continuity using that old galvanized bucket. I liked that thing. I should look for it.
The words are still waiting for me. I have 159 pages of something I’m happy with, for a whole number of reasons. And I have 58 pages of commentary in notes that I worked through last night. Today’s task is about making sure that what I discovered yesterday gets incorporated into the entire manuscript. On the surface, this looks like a technical manual for non-technical people. A how-to. Part reference, part guided tour through territory not many have explored. But beneath the hard surface of all those cautionary, encouraging, empowering instructions, there are these new threads of human experience that ask to be pulled together and woven into something tangible, something intelligible, something legible, so that people understand what they should and should not fear. And why. So that people understand what they can and cannot control… And what to do about all of that.
How strange, the places where we meet life. And how wonderfully, awfully odd, the places it decides to meet us.