I Will Leave the House for One Specific Cookie
A couple of weeks ago, I said to a friend that the older I get, the harder it is to make myself leave the house. This felt true. I like it here. I like my books, my garden and my coffee made exactly the way I want it. I like knowing where the bathroom is. I like having access to every sweater I own in case the temperature changes by half a degree. Most of all, I like my own company.
At home, I do not have to find parking, decide what to wear or calculate the exact moment at which I should begin getting ready for something happening in two hours. I can read. I can write. I can putter around the garden. I can reorganize a drawer or simply open it, look at the problem and close it again. There is always something I genuinely want to do here.
This seemed like compelling evidence that I was becoming a person who no longer liked to go out.
Then I began observing my actual behaviour.
It turns out I will drive 20 minutes across town for one specific sea-salt chocolate-chip cookie from Fife Bakery. Not a cookie. That cookie. I will pass several perfectly respectable bakeries along the way. They also sell cookies. Some of them may even contain chocolate and salt. This is irrelevant. They are not the cookie I have decided I want.
If someone texts to say that a mahjong game is about to happen, I can abandon an entire evening’s worth of carefully considered plans within minutes. The plans may have included reading, writing, folding laundry and going to bed early. They may have been excellent plans. But there is mahjong. I am suddenly out the door with the speed and decisiveness of someone responding to a small domestic emergency.
Then there was the fern.
I wanted a fern for the front garden. Again, not merely a fern. There were plenty of ferns available. I wanted one of a particular size, shape and general fern disposition that would look as though it had always belonged in the precise spot I had chosen.
I drove to three nurseries. They were not close to one another. At the first nursery, the ferns were too small. At the second, they were too ordinary. At the third, I found one with the correct combination of height, fullness and quiet woodland confidence. I put it in the car and drove home enormously pleased with myself.
This is not the conduct of a woman who finds it difficult to leave the house. This is the conduct of a woman who needs a sufficiently specific reason.
I have not become a homebody. I have become discerning about departures. There is a difference.
A vague invitation to “come out” may feel overwhelming. Where? For how long? Who will be there? Will there be chairs? What is the parking situation? Is this an event where people stand holding small plates?
But tell me there is an exact cookie, an available mahjong chair or a fern with excellent structure, and I am already looking for my keys.
The older I get, the less motivated I am by the general idea that I should get out more. “Getting out” is not an activity. It is leaving a place I like for a place that has not yet made its case.
When I was younger, going out was often enough. The fact that something was happening somewhere created its own momentum. There might be people. There might be fun. There might be a story worth telling later. You went because staying home seemed like evidence that life was occurring elsewhere. Home was where you waited between things.
Now, a great deal of life occurs at home. I have arranged it that way deliberately. The chairs are comfortable. The light is good. The coffee is a known quantity. The garden contains several plants for which I have crossed municipal boundaries.
Home has become formidable competition.
This means invitations are no longer competing with nothing. They are competing with the life I already planned to enjoy. A mediocre outing once had to beat boredom. Now it has to beat my own chair, a good book and the possibility that I might go to bed at eight.
That is a very strong field.
I used to think my increasing reluctance to leave the house was about energy. Perhaps it is, a little. Still, the cookie disproves the energy theory. Apparently, I possess considerable energy when correctly motivated. I can cross town, circle the block, pay for parking and stand in line. I can do all of this for a baked good that will be gone before I return home. Likewise, I can spend an afternoon visiting nurseries without experiencing the slightest resentment.
But ask me to attend something I do not particularly want to attend, even if it is six minutes away, and I begin behaving like a Victorian woman advised against unnecessary travel.
It is not distance. It is desire.
This realization has been useful because it changes the question. It is not: Why is it becoming so hard to leave the house? Perhaps it is: What still makes me want to?
The answers are surprisingly clear. My friends. A game I love. A beautiful garden centre. An excellent bookstore. A particular meal. The ocean. The possibility of finding exactly the right plant. Sometimes a very good cookie.
These things generate their own momentum. I do not need to persuade myself to go. I do not need to employ the adult equivalent of promising a child a treat afterwards. The outing is the treat.
There are also the things I thought I wanted until I found myself sitting in the car hoping for a cancellation. At this age, I am becoming better at distinguishing among them.
The goal cannot be to leave the house only when every part of me feels enthusiastic. Left entirely in charge, the part of me currently nearest the sofa has disproportionate influence. But neither do I want to keep accepting plans simply because an empty square appeared on the calendar. An empty square is not a problem to be solved.
This is one of the quieter freedoms of getting older: the growing understanding that availability is not the same as willingness. I can be free on Thursday and still not want to go. I can also have a carefully planned afternoon at home and abandon it because someone has found a fourth for mahjong.
This may sound inconsistent. It is. But perhaps consistency is overrated.
Apparently, I do not want fewer plans. I want more irresistible ones.
The danger, of course, is allowing discernment to become an elegant name for inertia. It would be easy to remain home so successfully that the world became something I read about. I do not want that. The world contains my friends. It contains golf courses, bookstores, bakeries and nurseries with entire greenhouses full of plants I have not yet decided I need.
Home is good partly because I leave it. I go out, collect things, a conversation, a story, a fern, and bring them back.
Perhaps that is the pattern I had failed to notice. I do not leave the house because I dislike being here. I leave because there is something out there I want to add to the life inside it.
This week, it was a fern. The week before, it was mahjong.
Today, I have no plans to go anywhere.
But Fife is only 20 minutes away.
~ Danielle