One of the life lessons that didn’t make it into my Inside Baseball week blog about the horrible personal insights that come with owning a business is this: I am prone to extremes. One of my earliest blogs for this site was about the week I spent in the woods on my bike, sleeping outside even in the rain. After returning from that trip, we launched Aftermath, and I have been mostly inside doing that since then.
It’s bad! I get very busy and a whole day passes, and then a whole string of days passes, and then I look up from my nest of papers and notebooks and think, “When is the last time I left the house?” I’ll try to force myself to go on little walks around my DC neighborhood, and I can string together a few days of this before an especially busy jag catapults me back into non-stop work mode.
You should not live like this, and I do not want to live like this. So on Sunday, while drinking some coffee and futzing with the business math, I shouted to myself, “No! No more math! No more work!” and went out to see DC’s cherry blossoms. If you don’t know this–I didn’t until I lived here–the cherry blossoms are a whole big deal in this town. People track their progress to “peak bloom,” which is when 70% of the trees’ blossoms are open. Everything gets cherry blossom-themed. People drive like maniacs around the Tidal Basin, where the most trees are, though people also have strong opinions on other, less touristy viewing spots. There’s a festival! There’s a footrace! The first time I learned how intense DC is about its trees I was so enamoured that I convinced my colleagues at The Washington Post to make a bingo card about it, mostly but not entirely so I would have an excuse to say the phrase “peduncle elongation” while wearing a dress shirt.
Peak bloom came early this year because of climate change, which is the kind of depressing fact that would keep me inside in a ball of despair on my couch. But no: I went outside, biking down to the Tidal Basin to take in the sights with the hundreds of other people who had the same idea. The blossoms don’t last very long, which is part of the reason for the frenzy around them, and they are both abundant and fragile in a way that fills me with panic and awe about being alive. They are very beautiful! Lots of things in this town are over-hyped, and living where the government is can feel like walking by the school principal’s office but as a grownup, but it’s hard to hate a town that can look so pretty, if only for like a week.
People are really serious about taking photos of the blossoms, but I am absolutely terrible at taking photos. Nevertheless, here are some terrible photos.
I ran into a friend while walking around, which meant I got to talk to someone not over a Zoom call, another rare treat. Some musicians were busking, and I sat under a tree and relived the childhood trauma of being a cellist during Pachelbel’s Canon while looking at the water and all the happy people and reflecting on the fleeting beauty of life without having too big of an existential breakdown about it. On the bike ride home I stopped at a food hall I’d never heard of and had a shockingly affordable falafel (food in this town costs a fortune!) and talked to a friend on the phone. It was all super normal regular person weekend stuff, the kind of thing I tend to completely forget about when I have other things going on. It was really great, and I recommend it.
If you’re reading this, maybe you are a coder or a gamer or a small business owner or some other kind of person who has lots of things going on inside that make it easy to forget that there are lots of places where those things aren’t. One of my favorite things about jumping on my bike and pedalling off into the world is that there’s so much world out there to just wander into, to check out what other people are doing and get some perspective on my own bullshit. When I first took up rock climbing and distance running, I joked that they were great because they let me literally flee my problems, both horizontally and vertically. The world is very big, and there are lots of things in it that aren’t you. It can feel good to go hang out with those things, if and when you can.
I recognize the contradiction of extolling the virtues of going outside when I am writing this on my computer and maybe you are reading it on yours, though maybe you’re reading it on your phone, which can go outside with you as long as you don’t look at it while moving. So maybe do that! I should probably do that, because it is good for me and also because I am out of food at home and also because DC is already panicking about how long the cherry blossoms will last. So let’s do it, pals: let’s go outside.
