I am drinking a bracing cuppa this morning with two bags of Scottish Breakfast with a bit of milk. It is the kind of tea that straightens the spine and eases the tiredness, if just a little bit. Outside my window, the maples are in full oranges and yellows, the oak and sweetgums a myriad of red, the entire landscape shaded and cloaked in a cold mist that soaks through even the best of layers.

It is, in a word, Autumn in the Pacific Northwest.

This weekend there is forecasted an atmospheric river, the kind with inches of rain in an hour and winds taking care of some additional leaf fall. It will be wet, cold, and windy. Pretty normal for this time year and usually my favorite kind of weather.

Not this time.

I will be out in the woods, with a forty-pound pack, leading a group of new Search and Rescue trainees in their first overnight weekend of training. We will eat out of our packs, sleep under tarps (hammock tarps, not the ones you get at the hardware store) and in general try to cover twelve to fifteen miles in the pouring rain and wind.

And though I will have to maintain (pretend?) a positive outlook during the weekend to keep everyone’s morale from tanking as we complete our assigned tasks, here in this space I get to say it:

It Sucks.

Cold. Wet. Uncomfortable. Feet and back and legs aching. Those in charge like to compare it to bootcamp for volunteers. I, who never was in the military nor had/have any desire to be militant, dislike the overarching theme of the weekend. I am a civilian. Sure, I’ve put my body through things like running marathons and half marathons, oh and also things like childbirth and car accidents, but I take no joy in doing those things to my body, nor do I take joy in making others do it.

A dark thought, but sometimes I wonder if leadership gets a particular thrill out of watching the new trainees and those in charge of them struggle through the weather as they bunk down in their RVs, because “they did all that too at one point.”

A hazing if you will, though now that I have been doing this for awhile, I was kind of hoping I was exempt.

Guess not.

It is moments like these, when faced with the reality of what I must do compared to the real-world benefit of being part of a search and rescue team, that I question my commitment to the whole thing.

Life is like that, isn’t it?

Jobs, occasions, family drama, moments in time when you look around and think: “is this what I want to do right now?” Sometimes the answer is no.

Fuck this job, I quit. Or, nope I will not be attending that event because it sounds terrible. Or, yeah, I think I will distance myself from that crazy-ass cousin that has way too much fun shooting at squirrels.

But then there are those moments when the benefit and the drawbacks are about tied.

I want to quit my job, but I can’t find another one and I still need to pay bills and eat.

I want to distance myself from the family drama, but it is my sister and she needs help navigating the drama that she has created herself.

Or.

Being out in an atmospheric river in the mid to low 40s, knowing that I will have to bunk down in a damp sleeping bag and try not to get hypothermia, while also making sure my team doesn’t get hypothermia and crash out, all because I might, one day, be the one to find a lost child, parent, or grandparent.

Tension.

With no real way of easing the tension.

So our brains do things like cognitive dissociation, where we step back from our current situation and daydream of other realities, or think of the future, or somehow distance ourselves from reality by thinking of something that is better.

A better job.

A stable marriage.

A weekend that does not include hypothermia.

Avoidance-based coping.

Our brains do it for us automatically; that’s why sometimes you might find yourself daydreaming while sitting in snarled commuter traffic. Or making Pinterest boards that look like the life you wish for but don’t have currently.

To a certain extent, it’s healthy. When reality is a shit show, thinking of a better future sometimes helps propel ourselves into that better future. I’m not too sure about woo woo manifestation, but envisioning the thing you want really does help. For instance, think of an athlete that imagines making a free throw. It has been proven over and over that envisioning the free throw going into the basket does increase the odds of actually making it.

(Our brains are wild)

But in a situation where change is either not possible or filled with tension, daydreaming is a way to escape. Distracting ourselves is a way to remove ourselves from something we don’t want to be in, whether that is reading, watching television, scrolling TikTok for the dopamine hits, or even things like taking drugs and drinking alcohol.

Blunting our reality.

For me and this dreaded weekend, I will not be taking tequila shots and have no ability to lose myself in a movie or a book, but I will likely find myself staring out into space, water soaking through my layers and layers of rain gear, dreaming about sitting with a sleeping cat, cuppa in hand, warm, dry and content.

Is that enough of a distraction to keep doing this? I don’t know… stay tuned.

But, in the meantime enjoy your weekend my friends, cuppa in hand and maybe a cat on your lap… I will be dreaming of the same.