Dear Reader,
As you read this, I am on my annual rest-read-write retreat at Skaneateles Lake, so I am offering this column about a past trip in 2010. Of course, I don’t yet know what will come from the creative space of this year’s visit, but I promise to let you know in a future column.
My time at the lake this year was about being in the here and now. I try to do this at home, but being away frames it differently.
There’s the packing and the unpacking, the seven hour trip there and back, the joy of arriving and the sadness of leaving. Going to the same place every year has sharpened my awareness of these dichotomies, and I know the alternating rhythm well enough that sway with it immediately.
Growing a lawn, rather than isolated clumps of grass, is a problem on a sand bar, which is a good description of outer Cape Cod, where I live.
Sometimes I’ve just had it with the absurd extremes marketing goes to and I have to stand up and say, “Enough!”
It seems like just about everyone I’ve talked to lately has commented about the accelerated pace of their lives. 
It was cabin fever, the need for a broader view of world than the one of the bird feeder outside my office window, that gave me the idea of going away for few days. 
With his usual talent for organization and clarity, Daniel Pink, the author of 
A 2005 article in the London Evening Standard about overwhelmed working women advised them “not to struggle into work when ill but to stay at home and rest.” Likewise, the November 2009 issue of Working Women magazine cautioned readers against “dragging [their] fever-ridden [bodies] into the office.” 
