A slightly younger friend of mine is traveling now on an open-ended trip in South America. She and her husband and two sons began in Ecuador and are camping, hiking, bussing, driving their way from there to Tierra del Fuego. They might be gone for six months.

I have spent an inordinate time thinking about this trip of theirs—something about it makes me feel bad about myself. They’ve been sending photos and email missives and, even as I regard the photos and hear of their adventures and see other friends reacting with envy, there isn’t a bone in my body that wishes to be there myself. What can be wrong with me? Am I lazy? Uncurious? Too old? Too set in my ways for such an adventure? In the recent past I have enjoyed very rewarding—though much briefer and less physically demanding—trips to Zimbabwe and Greenland, why couldn’t I enjoy longer and more uncharted travel like theirs?

But today I read a quote from Virginia Woolf that brought me some relief. I came across it in an essay quaintly titled “Professions for Women.”

…a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living—so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirt, the imagination.

How aptly she describes me! (Try to ignore the male pronoun.) My novelist self adores the regularity of my life, its relative predictability. I love achieving a bodily state that releases me to live primarily in my head. To arrive at this “unconscious”—but highly attuned—state I rarely leave the house before noon, arrange few social engagements during the week, exercise daily, sleep a minimum of eight hours; in short, I lead a life that would bore most people. But in such a life, freed to roam in the labyrinthine fissures of my imagination, to follow inklings of story, people, ideas, that gather heft and meaning as I pursue them day after day, I thrive. There have been times in my life when I have sought more stimulation, but even at those times, I was always headed to the tranquil place I am now, mining what I’ve already seen and felt and thought, and trying to transform pieces of those disparate experiences into novels. It takes a kind of stillness, even lethargy, that allows the turning inward.

That you, Virginia Woolf, this is not the first time I’ve found solace and vindication in your words.

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