The Tick Box Life

It was a late Key Largo afternoon as The Blue Eyed Wonder climbed into the deck chair at Snapper’s Turtle Bar. They’re the ones at the far end of the deck, right against the rail and next to the water. Sitting next to me she looked elfin, and the truth is she’s only about half a head taller than Tinkerbell.

Her thick and therefore uncontrollable dark brown hair had developed red highlights from two weeks of being in the sun. She kicked off the bright pink size 5 flip flops and put her tiny feet onto the chair rail and looked at me over the top of her mirrored prescription Ray-Ban aviators. I call her the Blue Eyed Wonder because of the depth of the shading in her eyes. Ask anyone who meets her what she looks like and they couldn’t say, all they can do is describe the intensity of the colour and focus in her stare. If you stare at them long enough you go straight to your secret inside places and tell her things you wouldn’t tell another soul. More than one person has spent years wondering how she got them to confess.

I’ve known her about thirty years. Off and on we had drifted through the years. Not as a couple, though that had happened once or twice. We had become companions in life. At least as much as someone who trusts no one, can trust anyone else, and that’s how she fit so uniquely into the structure of quietude and contemplation that I have finally achieved in my life.

We both ordered beer, the Sandbar Sunday, a locally brewed wheat ale. The tropical heat began to show in the sweat on the glass. It’s something you get used to, glasses that sweat and you learn to turn your head just slightly so it doesn’t drip on your shirt.

“You changed after the road trip. More withdrawn, even quieter than before, and yet more verbose at the same time. Plus you seem more intimately aware of what’s around you.”

“Whenever you travel for any period of time you become aware of all the tick boxes in your day to day life. All those things you do without thinking or questioning. Your work life has its tick boxes, your social life has its tick boxes, and your internal musings have their own tick boxes.”

I took a swallow of the beer and stared at the low stand of mangroves to my left. A two seat Waverunner went screaming past before I could say more. I’m not a fan of anything whose sole reason for existence is making noise and going fast without any real purpose. The beer was wonderful against the back of my throat.

“People like to have their lives orderly and predictable.” She said.

“Yes, and so did I until I began to notice there was more to it. I’m fortunate in that I travel alone. I get the luxury of time to not only see new things at my own speed, but also have the time to look at how I feel in seeing those new things. That’s when I discovered the idea of tick boxes. On the road across South Dakota I realized I was seeing more, hearing more, smelling more. And it made sense to me, because I was in a mode of being that demanded I be aware of everything. Everything had changed. I was alone in an unknown place and space. I had no infrastructure to support me in case of a problem. I had to seek out food, shelter, and even water. I had to be present in the moment at all times, in order to just survive that moment.”

Our deluxe cheeseburgers arrived, hers with Sharp Ceddar, mine with Provolone. She added Ketchup and nothing else. I have a fair sized infrastructure to support, so I added Ketchup, Mayo, and mustard.

“Do you eat a lot of this stuff when travelling?”

“Depends on the local menu. I prefer a salad option with burgers anywhere I go, but here it doesn’t seem to register with anyone. It’s always fries, like in England it’s chips. I once saw a menu there that offered lasagna with chips. Certain foods define a culture. In Greece I found yogurt, or something yogurt based was served with most everything. Mostly I eat whatever I feel is appropriate. The road trip featured a lot of pork and beef ribs. They were a signature theme and I wanted to experience them in different cities and environments. I am always glad to see fresh vegetables on a menu, especially steamed ones.”

Watching the Blue Eyed Wonder eat is an experience. Her delicate features and small mouth belie a ravenous appetite that she indulges with a surprising amount of ladylike grace in the face of its feral ferocity. It’s like watching a professional butcher, all economy of motion with no wasted effort. For me a successful meal is one that I don’t share with my shirt front.

She swallowed and asked “You still didn’t tell me why you changed?”

I had to think for a minute to try and phrase it, without wanting to sound pedantic or trite. So I finished the beer and signaled for another round before launching forth.

“It had to do with the tick boxes. I didn’t have them anymore. Somewhere on the road they disappeared and when I came home it worried me, a lot. I could no longer just lollygag through my day to day life with that blanket of emotional and intellectual certainty that everything would be what it was before. I started to ask myself questions that had to with relevance and reason. What I had was a greater awareness of what was going on around me. All the little things I had ignored or deemed irrelevant. The incompetence’s, the bickering, the negligence’s. Every little petty thing that I had written off as the background noise of my life became a major point of intellectual and emotional contention. And I saw others doing as I had done, ignoring or rationalizing a huge part of their lives, and that bothered me too. I kept flashing back to points on the road, a second of experience, a flavor or taste, a smell of Gulf air or the colour of the Great Plains sky. The feeling of belonging to the land of the Black Hills, all without ever being able to define why or how. It was all happening under the surface, and I couldn’t put a finger on what was happening to me or my life. I didn’t have the emotional or intellectual vocabulary to have that conversation with myself, and so my frustrations grew and grew.”

She took off her sunglasses and gave me the full force of those deep blue irises, the left one with a small fleck of gold at the outer edge, the right one with a fleck of jade green, square on the dot of midnight. She put her chin in the palm of a hand, elbow resting on the arm of the chair, and said, “Like a kind of PTSD?”

“Such a clinical term for something that in the end turned out to be beneficial, and that induced the kind of change that made possible a new way of thinking and living. So no, not PTSD. It was a wakeup call that I could no longer just tick boxes for the rest of my life. I had to find a way to excite and stimulate all of those senses, all of the time. Life fully open has become an addictive experience.”

“Is that why you are so annoying in re-phrasing every question to have a positive spin?”

“Yes!! Because if you ask every question, or make a statement as a given and predictable entity you miss the point of actually questioning. My former employment life is now filled with such language and it’s become boring and predictable. So, like many others I’ve tuned out. I realized if I was going to learn about a place and its people I needed to open up to the locals, including the locals at home. The Chamber of Commerce is full of glossy tourist brochures, but really light on any actual colour of a place. Visiting a new place is only part of travel to me. Getting behind the lives of the people who live there tells me what I really travel for, to understand a way of life. And the only way to do that is to ask positive questions, and to be fully open to the answers and building on that, not steering it in a chosen direction. I had to eliminate the tick boxes around ‘Nice weather we’re having’ and actually put meaning into asking ‘How’s your day?’ and really wanting to know the answer and build a conversation around it.”

She put her glasses back on and nodded very slowly as if trying to grasp the niggly edges of what I’d said. I knew exactly how she felt, unexpected changes were far harder to accept than the ones planned and executed. And when those changes don’t happen to you, they are mostly impossible to grasp.

The sun was in its waning phase behind us. The clouds out over Hawk Channel were starting to turn a light pink that was deepening by the minute. The server removed the plates with the obligatory “Anything else?” We agreed to not go beyond the two beers without saying a word. She climbed down from the stool like a child from a dining room chair, slid back into the pink flip flops, and we walked through the bar holding hands, without a word.

She would muse over this conversation for a few days. I could tell in the long periods of silence and the way she would look at the water off the house deck at the two mangrove islands that sit in the channel. Whatever was going on in her head stayed there, at least for now.