“We should move to Manderfield.”
I say it almost every time my wife and I drive to and from southern Utah. Somewhere around Beaver, as the freeway begins advertising towns most people have never visited, I start pointing.
Manderfield. Paragonah. Circleville. Toquerville. Kanarraville. Lots of -villes.
Dozens of small towns sit just off Interstate 15 in southern Utah. There’s something appealing about places most of the world drives past.
My wife and I talk about pulling off the highway and spending a day wandering through these towns to see what life is really like. I don’t know whether people in Manderfield actually live slower than I do. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they spend more time driving just to buy groceries, go to work, or refill their Charlie’s Market mug with Diet Dr. Pepper.
But I’ve become increasingly interested in places where life doesn’t seem organized around getting somewhere faster or doing something more efficiently.
Truth be told, though, I think what I’m longing for really isn’t a different town, just a different pace.
While my wife and kids dozed in the car on a recent trip to and from, I sat with that question for a while.
While in St. George, I decided to run the six or so miles from where were staying to my in-laws’ house. The idea sounded reasonable enough until I stepped out the door.
There are different kinds of hot in Utah in July. St. George seems to have a different kind of relationship with summer than the rest of the state. Triple-digit temperatures aren’t unusual, and stretches above 110°F aren’t uncommon. It was already 81 degrees when I left at 4:30 that morning.
The combination of heat and the extra forty pounds I’ve been lugging around my midsection quickly turned what I’d imagined would be an acceptable run into a long series of walks. Once the sun crested the horizon, the temperature rose noticeably by the minute.
At first, I was annoyed that I couldn’t keep running, but then something unexpected happened.
Somewhere on a long, winding “tributary” street to Washington Fields, I started to notice things I would have missed if I was just pounding the pavement. Trees I couldn’t name stretched over sidewalks and streets, providing welcome shade. Flowering shrubs and vines spilled over block walls. Male cicadas singing for a mate. The red cliffs that make southern Utah so unique and instantly recognizable radiated the morning sun. People were walking dogs. Couples stood on street corners talking to neighbors. Cyclists hurried past.
Neighborhood after neighborhood woke up in a way I would have missed if I’d been driving or running hard.
That’s when the thought hit me: I was only witnessing all of this because I wasn’t in such a hurry to get back to Grannie’s house.*
Had I been running the pace I’d planned or wanted, I probably wouldn’t remember any of it. I never would have noticed the hues of pink and green in those flowers or the din of the cicadas or street-corner conversations. I’m somewhat confident that what I witnessed wasn’t a one-off event in St. George. However, I had to slow down to even notice any of it.
Running has become another place in my life where efficiency tries to take over. Even at forty pounds overweight, I think about how much faster my per-mile speed should be. Every watch and app wants to tell me whether I’m ahead of yesterday or to “share my run” with my friends. It’s weird how I can go out and spend an hour outside without ever really being outside.
We’re always trying to get somewhere: graduation, buy the house, pay off the debt, get promoted, lose forty pounds, etc.
While we spend out lives becoming experts at arriving, we simultaneously become amateurs at noticing. We spend so much of life preparing for tomorrow that the beautiful things of today become unnoticed scenery that flashes by.
I’ll probably still tell my wife we should move to Manderfield. Who knows? Maybe we will someday.
Over the last 18 months or so, I’ve had a lot of realizations. I think the pull isn’t actually to move to some hidden, tiny Utah town where cows outnumber people. I think there’s a choice waiting to be made to stop treating every moment like something to get through on the way to something better.
I don’t really have to move to Manderfield to slow down. I just have to stop being in such a hurry to get there, wherever there is.
* To be fair, I was in a hurry to get back to Grannie's but my own physiological capability and the heat prevented it. In the words of Bob Ross, the realization was just a "happy, little accident".
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