A Place to Think

Do you ever feel like your life is you in a barrel being shoved along a fast moving river and you are hanging on for dear life, trying to stay afloat, water splashing in your face, with a doomed feeling that any minute you are going to plunge over a waterfall that will mean sudden death or at the very least a merciless knocking about?

Me neither.

 Yes! I’ve totally felt that way. Actually, I’m just now starting not to feel that way. I can finally catch my breath and think. 

The thing is, one needs a place to think. And I’m partially writing this post to gratuitously include this photograph:

Not to show off my mad photography skills (I took it with an iPad) but because finding that place made me so ridiculously happy. 

I didn’t know this overlook existed until a few weeks ago when my husband, trying to find a specific entrance to the pictured US Army Corps of Engineers created lake, stopped at this entrance to hop out and look at a map. 

I considered punching him in the face when he got back in the car for not showing me the site sooner. We live in HIS home town. A place like this should have been on the welcome tour, NINE YEARS AGO. But, I’m trying not to dwell on the past. Instead, I bookmarked the site in my GPS so I could find it again. Oh yeah, I’m a thinker. 

So, when he took the kids for the day on Saturday to visit his family, off I went to my new spot. There is a parking area and one tree under which one can sit in the grass if she so chose, which I did. I pulled out my iPad and took this picture (the shadow is shade from said tree) and then proceeded to dump all of the noise from my head onto the touch screen. 

Then I just sat. And that was the best part. The just sitting part is why we need to find places like this in our world. 

Not just beautiful places. My forest is beautiful. Being outside is beautiful. We need to visit vast places. A place where you and your life and your problems feel so very small. Because they are. The world is so big and we are just little dots moving around. We carry our load and it feels so heavy but it is just a dot too. A speck. I find that sensation so liberating. I think better when I feel that way. And now I have the perfect spot.