Larger than Life

A small but fierce reflection on the start of 2022.

A Bear Walking ca. 1482–85, Leonardo da Vinci, Public Domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

This holiday, the kids and I road-tripped from New York City to Nashville to see family.

Normally we’d fly. Nashville’s just far enough away to make it inconvenient to drive, but, seriously, our dog is just too darn cute. We had to bring her. All seventy-five pounds of her.

The stretch of highway between New York and Nashville unfolds through seven states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, and finally Tennesse. Except for brief views of the Blue Ridge Mountains and The Great Smoky Mountains, it’s basically a straight shot on flat roads with very little scenery.

December 22, 2021, opposite the entrance to Lincoln Tunnel. Our final glimpse of the city before hitting the highway to Nashville. Photo by author.

Long, boring drives are not usually my thing, but this time I couldn’t wait.

Living in NYC, it’s easier for me not to own a car, so the only time I find myself behind the wheel anymore is for the occasional soccer game (ZipCar’s got me covered) and while traveling. For the most part, I don’t miss it. I love the ability to walk everywhere and the idea of a reduced carbon footprint.

Lately, though, I’ve been craving the open road. Deeply. A road trip offered me the chance to zone out, step away from my computer and from social media and from the endless news cycle. I wanted the soft time to map out sections of my novel in my head and to tease out solutions to a few tricky business problems. I’d set my heart on reading, or audio reading anyway, as I never have time to curl with a book.

Most of all, I wanted to do some deep thinking about 2022 while we drove. I was happy to give up the literal view to gain a figurative view on the next twelve months.

Door-to-door, roundtrip, I had 27 hours, 14 minutes to come up with a plan.

The trip started off great, with surprisingly little traffic given it was Christmas week.

Then, early on the second day of our journey, the GPS informed me of a road hazard ahead. It was a strange choice of words, and I assumed it meant an accident. The GPS also stated we were still on the fastest route to Nashville, promptly adding fifty-two minutes to our trip. I was excited about our road trip, but not that excited. It’s a lot of driving for one person.

We inched along for twenty minutes, then another twenty, and then another twenty. Finally close enough, we could see no sign of an accident. No overturned car, no emergency vehicles, nothing. The breakpoint in the traffic was now visible, and that’s when I saw it, out the driver’s side window. A bear. A goddamned bear.

The sight of it seemed farfetched, ludicrous even. But, there it was. Dense, black, and motionless.

In my rational mind, a dead bear on the side of the road was, of course, a possibility. Humans are encroaching on bear habitat, pushing them into more populated areas—we all know that. And the Blue Ridge Mountains were (sort of) nearby. It was absolutely a possibility.

Still. Bear roadkill.

It was likely a cub, and nevertheless massive. Blood pooled on the asphalt beneath its head. As we rolled by for a short twenty seconds or so, the kids unhooked their seatbelts and leaned over to get a closer look.

And just like that, a few feet past the bear, the highway. Wide-open, the traffic vanished.

I pushed on the gas and took us from zero to sixty. In the rearview mirror, four lanes of traffic ribboned backward as far as my eye could see. I felt overcome with the same sense of guilt and sadness that comes after rubbernecking a car accident, then leaving the pain and tragedy and inconvenience of strangers behind you—pedal to the metal.

The kids went back to their devices, and I felt my throat close off in anticipation of tears. It’s silly, I thought, to be this upset over a bear. With six hours to go before reaching Nashville, my thoughts wandered.

Later, as I’m prone to do, I had to research this whole situation. As soon as I got to Nashville, I learned the black bear population has made a great comeback in Virginia, climbing to 18,000-20,000 in 2021 from a low point in the 1940s of 1,000. Fortunately, the state is doing a lot of work to protect the bears and us from each other.

The Virginia Department of Transportation is putting together a “wildlife corridor plan” with animal-specific underpasses and fences to keep wildlife from cutting across highways. Image courtesy of the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Besides the zoo, I’ve only encountered a bear one other time in my life.

And that bear was very much alive and well. I’d been away on a long weekend in New Hampshire and out for a run in the woods when I came face-to-face with a black bear. It was eating, and I startled it. He/she went up on its hind legs but didn’t make a sound. I froze, then did exactly what you’re not supposed to do: I ran.

Lucky for me, he didn’t give chase, and I’m alive to tell the story. But the incident left me terrified of bears and produced background anxiety on every hike and camping trip since. Twenty years later, the encounter still seems surreal.

At a rest stop somewhere in Virginia after the bear sighting.

Recently, my twelve-year-old son told me he sometimes can’t believe Covid happened. He said, “Like, Mom, like the whole world shut down for over a year. We didn’t even go to school. Mom, that actually happened.”

“It’s unbelievable,” I’d replied. And it really is.

All of us have had to deal with the hardships of the pandemic alongside a multitude of personal challenges: remote learning, fragile marriages, the death of a loved one, loss of job, financial troubles, etc. Many days, our struggles feel larger than life given the backdrop of the pandemic. Think about it too much, and the pandemic seems farfetched. Ludicrous. Much like a bear encounter.

Way back in the summer of 2020, I’d written about my personal struggles in context of the pandemic, even making reference to Phase 1 reopenings being like bears poking their heads out, heavy-eyed and cautiously exiting the hibernation den.

Fast forward to December 2021, on the edge of 2022, and we were battling yet another variant, another surge, and the possibility of renewed lockdown measures. I know I wasn’t alone in feeling defeated. I’d pulled the kids out of school three days early so as not to expose them to Omicron and jeopardize our visit with grandparents. Feeling thrust back into societal hysteria, I’d scrubbed the rental car and hotel with antibacterial wipes. We skipped the included buffet breakfast where 100% of the guests roamed mask-free.

Hadn’t I already stared down this bear? Hadn’t I already become the bear, rising up on hind legs to intimidate and protect myself and my loved ones against this virus?

A third year of Covid seemed utterly intolerable.

Short sleeves! It was unseasonably warm in Nashville during our visit.

Seeing that dead bear was like driving by my fierce self. My fierce self, lifeless on the side of the road.

How did a creature so grand meet such a tragic outcome? Likewise, how did our magnificent effort over the past two years dealing with a pandemic put us seemingly right back where we’d been?

As the pandemic drags on, some of us are going to view New Year’s resolutions as pointless, while others of us will feel more emphatic, if not vicious, about them in the face of ongoing uncertain times. It’s unlikely either approach is all that healthy.

It's already almost the end of January, about the time many of us start floundering in our resolutions in normal years. A recent study out of the UK has found that about two-thirds of people abandon their New Years' resolutions within one month. Not very encouraging!

Of course, there's a lot of material out there on the best way to set and keep annual goals. The common advice suggests resolutions fail because they're too vague. Our goals should be SMART, an acronym coined in 1981 that means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

Others warn cultural timeline goals, like New Year's Day, create artificial pressure for a big change. If we don't meet the inflated, flip-of-the-calendar-year goal, we can be left feeling anxious and depressed.

The reigning philosophy on New Year's goals proposes setting intentions, rather than goals. I like to think about goals as what I'd like to do and intentions as the how I'd like to do. Setting intentions is about merging our values with what we enjoy doing. For instance, I enjoy history and art, and I value being present for my children above all else. This could translate into spending more time this year going to museums or traveling with my kids.

Admittedly, I'm not off the start line yet. A few years ago, I realized trying to begin anything just after the hubbub of the holidays was a recipe for failure, so now I like to kick things off mid-month and sometimes later.

The office of the French ambassador to Italy at Palazzo Farnese, Rome. Via @steffan⁠ #OfficeGoals

I won’t bore you with my list of goals for 2022. Well, other than to note, along with more meaningful plans, one of mine is to clean and organize my office. I’m drawing inspiration from this image of the office of the French ambassador to Italy at Palazzo Farnese in Rome.

With a 15th-century palace as my office inspo, you can tell I’ve been feeling rather vicious about my goals. This was going to be the year I nailed my dreams. But the bear and Omicron and whatever else had left me foggy-headed again.

So, I lean on a life philosophy that’s helped me push through the hard times: Do the work.

Do the work.

For some of us, doing the work will simply be getting out of bed in the morning or drinking more water. For others, it’s marathon training or a change of career or walking away from a relationship. No problem is too small or too big.

The pandemic has caused many of us to reconsider the way we want to live our lives. That alone is hard work. I like the idea of giving ourselves credit for giving the tough stuff deep consideration.

Some of the best advice I’ve been given is to always behave like my future self. Make decisions based on what your future self would want. If you’re making decisions based on what your present self thinks is possible, then likely those choices are actually drowning in the limitations your past self is putting on your psyche.

Understandably, acting like your la-di-da future self can bring on imposter syndrome in a hot minute. I feel like an imposter every single day.

So I say, start small. Do the work.

Trust that you’re larger than life.

There’s still a wide-open highway in front of us.

Remember to occasionally check the rearview mirror for all that traffic and trouble you’ve already left behind.

These boots were made for walking, so that’s just what I’ll do! Lower Broad, Nashville, TN

P.S. I made it through two books on this trip! If want to feel motivated to grab life by the you-know-what, read this book. And this book on the history of rum was a rollicking good time.