Ahead of the AAHPM Annual Assembly, I return to San Diego for a much-needed stretch on my own - my first solo trip since October’s overnighters in New Hampshire, and May’s trip to Andalucía before those. Travel, recently, has turned into intensive bouts of family time; meaningful, to be sure, but very different than relaxing and expanding into a space to call one’s own. When Jane and Jordan and I travel, inevitably I’m in charge of the plan and the itinerary and the driving there, a significant part of the packing and re-packing, and all of the documenting it, the getting on with it. Not to mention some large portion of the parenting and disciplining and boundary-setting and feeding everyone. On my own, things are different. After a relatively busy January and February at work, I’m trying to find a pattern that I can sustain. Atypically, I’ve shown up in San Diego with barely a plan except to check into the hotel and melt into a puddle until I feel right. I’m joined by my co-fellow Lindsey, this being our long-deferred conference in San Diego, exactly six years after the pandemic smashed its thumb down on the world in March 2020. After a significant amount of melting, we head out and explore with her parents, and on our own. We also meet up with my mom on a wildlife-filled day trip to La Jolla Cove. In between, there’s a lot of lounging, reading (The War of Art by Steven Pressfield accompanies me this week), napping, and journaling. Lots of journaling. To go with the journaling, I’ve been doing a lot of quietly thinking this week, which is good. In the mornings, after breakfast, I run to the water from the utterly deserted Gaslamp District and do miles up and down the waterfront through Seaport Village. It feels good to be moving quickly again, and oh-so-warm in the balmy California sun; I develop a bit of a tan. In the afternoon (post-siesta), I look at the map and pick a random spot to reach by city bus, exploring different neighborhoods at dusk and continuing to experiment with nighttime photography. San Diego is a quirky place in the evening, with its Spanish colonial architecture and neon accents, its recognizably Californian suburbs that are at once familiar and a bit new. One of my favorites from the week is the photo above - a sidewalk snap of a scene near Old Town that reminded me vaguely of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise Over Hernandez when I passed by.
The conference is underway now, although per usual it has devolved into a motley sequence of coffee dates and catch-ups more than actual time spent conferencing or learning anything. My obligate introvert social battery is sitting somewhere near 0% - but so, I suspect, are most of the other conference-goers'. These are my people, after all. After a week of just being and engaging in all the patterns of care and expression that I’ve built over the years, I’m beginning to feel a little more grounded in space and time. Something is crystallizing. Admittedly I don’t know what it is. But I suspect I have it just about figured out.
