Bored and restless in lockdown, I had started remembering old road trips to Napa, Vermont, Carmel, Northern CT –all the little towns I loved to go and visit before Covid. My imagination would take over and I would fantasize about going back to these places, plus other, as-yet-unexplored-hidden-gems, just as soon as Covid was over…

The more I fantasized though, the more I noticed that there was a pattern to what I remembered of my road trips, each was more or less, largely the same: I’d roll into some town, I jump out of the car so eager to explore. To find something new and exciting ( which, for a peril call out, is how I ended up in NY).

But every town is basically the same, a grocery, bank, shops that sell gifts/clothes, restaurants. I zoom in so hard to each town, I get lost in details, I get intoxicated by the promise of something new. When I get to the end of a main street strip, when the cookie cutter houses begin, I have this palpable disappointment –I want more. I wanted more from the town. Another block, another ‘find’, something new and different than the last town.

It dawned on me that a major mechanism my mind uses to keep deluding myself is distraction with the details. If the details were always the same, then I would be bored and burned-out by life and rebirth already. It would be 100% clear to me that I had already ‘been there done that” and I could simply give up the quest for something new and different, something truly satisfying and enduring in this world.

But it’s the slight variations –a different shop, unique architecture, some ‘special’ tourist attraction, that feed the desire to keep heading to little towns to find something new and different to entertain me. It is details that feed my hope that a treasure is just around the corner. Hope feeds desire to quest, and desire feeds the entire continual cycle of born, do, die, repeat.

Now though, I am bored, nothing changes in this Covidverse, where I do the same stuff, see the same 1 person, live in the same 4 walls day-in-day-out. Details here are all the same and I am ready to be done. But details of yesterday, of past trips and future plans – crumbs – are enough to continue feeding the hope that one day will be different. And even if today sucks, tomorrow will be new, it will be different, it is worth hanging on for. Delusion is in the details.