* We've had one Perch, yes. But what about second Perch?
Every year, I take myself on a three-day retreat. Not a church retreat or a conference (I can only handle about one of those every two years). Just me, a hotel room, and more introvert time than any human should be allowed to have. I pick a nice hotel about as far as I can go on the DC Metro, usually in the Tysons or Reston area—close enough to home that it doesn't feel like a big production, far enough that I can't just wander back to my living room couch.
This year I stayed at The Watermark Hotel in Tysons. The rooms were gorgeous—spacious, quiet, the kind of place where you can actually think. The hotel restaurant was egregiously expensive, but fortunately the hotel sits above a Wegmans, so I lived like a king eating at the world's best grocery store food.
At my retreats I take myself out to eat. I read. I journal. I pray and meditate. I stare at walls in a way that would concern anyone who doesn't understand introverts.
But it's not a vacation. It's introspective work, the kind of thing that sounds merely indulgent until you understand why I do it.
I keep a Life in Weeks calendar on my wall, a poster with a grid, one box for every week of a typical human lifespan. You color in the weeks you've already lived, and what's left is what's left. It's the most cheerful piece of wall art you can imagine 🙃
I do this because I care deeply about the idea lifework. Not as in your 9-to-5, but as in, well, the work of your life. What is it that I want to be true about my life when I die? What will be written in my obituary? Said at my funeral? And if I want that to be true then, what do I need to be working on now? That question drives everything I do on retreat and drives a lot of what I do the rest of the year too.
This matters to me a lot because of the context I grew up in. My biological mother has schizophrenia. My half-sister lives with bi-polar disorder. My half-brother has been in and out of jail for drug offenses. My biological grandmother died of alcoholism. My biological grandfather died young of a heart attack. My biological father was in and out of jail for domestic violence. I was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect. Last year I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. I've had a coworker die by suicide. Many of my classmates burnt out from ministry.
I say all this because it's the fuel behind everything else in this post. When I talk about not wanting to waste my life, I'm not speaking from some vague motivational-poster energy but as someone who has a very clear picture of what the alternatives can look like. I have a deep sense of gratitude for the life I have now, and I don't want to take a single minute of it for granted.
(Reading this through again, I don't want to make it sound like the people I listed above could have just made better choices. Much of life is beyond our control. But, with the control I do have, I want to make the best of it).
Which—let's not kid ourselves—I have certainly wasted plenty of minutes. My kids renamed my Netflix profile to "Tiktok Is My Life." Ouch. I'm hardly some kind of hyper-focused, never-waste-a-moment monk.
But I don't want to look back at this whole life thing and feel like I slept-walked/auto-piloted/scrolled my way through it.
I know not everyone feels this same drive. But I also find that lack of drive hard to empathize with. I think we could all spend a bit more time thinking about our lifework.
