Author: Neera

Kay Bolden has packed her backpack and is sailing through the Panama Canal, around Madagascar, and up the Mediterranean. Then she’ll go who knows where else. She says the kids are grown, the sun is calling and she is taking her gap year.

She has just turned sixty.

Is there a thing called the midlife gap year? I didn’t know that.

Seems like there is. Everyone is writing about it.

First Kay Bolden wrote why I’m Taking a Gap Year at 60 then Shaunta Grimes wrote I Am Obsessed With The Idea of a Midlife Gap Year and before we know it everyone in this age group wants to have one, including me.

After spending years on making a living, raising children and caring for parents, my Sandwich Generation years are coming to an end. It is the time when my husband and I should live for ourselves. But the problem is, while going through the mayhem of life, we have forgotten who we are and what we want from life.

The gap year has a specific time and purpose. It normally follows after a vigorous study period or at a change of a career. It should also follow at the end of working life before settling into so-called retirement.

Most of us are now retiring in relatively good health and have several decades of life ahead of us. I have seen many people looking for some kind of ‘job’ after six months in retirement because staying at home became so boring for them. They were ready to go back to the very place they wanted to escape.

A midlife gap year is a perfect way to figure out what we want to do with the rest of our lives.

The teenagers take gap-years to widen their horizons, to see new places to experience new cultures. But for us, the middle-agers, the gap year should be about rediscovery. It should be like a pilgrimage we must take in order to connect with our souls.

And mind you the holidays won’t cut it.

The holidays are dedicated to sightseeing. And they are well-planned and extremely busy. They end pretty soon too. A gap year is totally different.

Ideally, a gap year should be away from the touristy destinations, preferably in a quiet corner of the world where there is nothing between you and nature other than a few locals. Hotels are out of question and so are the luxury coaches. Replace them with small units or paying guest sort of facilities and throw in local trains and buses.

You don’t need to plan anything. Just spread the world map on your dining table, take a pin, close your eyes and place the pin on one of the continents carefully avoiding the oceans. Then figure out how to get there.

It is living like a nomad for a year. So many young and old people are doing it. And you don’t have to do it for the whole year to start with.

So what are you waiting for? Plan your gap year.

I will let you know when I plan mine.

On Sunday afternoon, I decided to go for a walk after lunch. The weather had been nice and I had been for a walk for days.

I choose a path I hadn’t traversed before and as they say, it made all the difference.

First, I was greeted by a bunch of rabbits who were playing in the grass. I tiptoed to take a photo they heard me and ran away except one who looked a the camera and stayed just long enough for me to capture him in the camera.

Then, two unusual colored objects caught my attention and I made a point to climb the hill to check them out. They turned out to be broken witches’ hats.

But when I turned the corner, a tree made me stop in tracks. A mature tree, old enough to be a grandfather of other trees around it, stood proudly at the intersection perfectly balancing its foliage on two arms like an old man with grandchildren on his shoulders.

I stood still in front of it for a while, listening to its leaves rustling in the light breeze. It sounded as if it was talking to me. Often used as a metaphor for life itself, trees are most penetrating preachers (borrowing Herman Hesse’s words). Their message is of strength and endurance; renewal and growth; shelter and being grounded.

Harmen Hesse wrote an essay on trees:

I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.

In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.

Often we get sick of our surroundings and want to escape secretly harboring a desire to travel to faraway places to grow and to renew. But trees stand at the same place at all their lives and are still revered.

I walked further and soon after was stopped by another one. This one had a wrinkled trunk like the neck of an old man.

A few hundred meters later another one beckoned me. Now I was on a familiar stretch, how come I had never noticed it before. It had a lump, like a hunchback but it stood proudly, unperturbed by its deformity.

“This is what happens when you take the road less traveled”, I said to myself, “you look at things with a new perspective, you notice things which you wouldn’t on a familiar path, you strike conversations with strangers.”

Kahlil Gibran wrote, ” Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.” I think he must have been referring to this tree.

It reminded me of a poem I had read once by Joyce Kilmer:

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.

A tree that looks at God all day

And lifts her leafy arms to pray

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair.

Upon whose bosom snow has lain

Who intimately lives with rain

Poems are made by fools like me

But only God can make a tree.