The Rishikesh Autorickshaw Ride

Have you ever come across a photo from your past and not been able to take your eyes off of it? I recently found a mesmerizing image from eight years ago. I am sitting in an autorickshaw in Rishikesh, India, between two fellow travelers. I remember the exact moment it was taken, and the unfettered joy I felt.

Maybe it was the shirodhara treatment I’d had. Or the handful of unlabeled over-the-counter antibiotics I’d taken a friend’s word for the night before. Or the overwhelming refreshment of Rishikesh, where the streets are clean and the Ganges headwaters run with the clear ice blue of glacier melt. (We did get chased down the street by monkeys, but that may have added to the invigoration—the adrenaline rush of the pursuit followed by the relief of escape).

The rickshaw wasn’t taking us anywhere particularly special, I think; just to get the best lassi in the world (and it was). After floating on the Ganges past the ghats in Varanasi, sitting under the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, and marveling at the stunning mosaics of semi-precious stones in the Taj Mahal (the architecture was lovely, but I just kept staring at the walls!), the trip was winding down. The sightseeing was over; it was time to just be, to rest, to let it all soak in before the transition to the long journey home—a vast geographic and experiential distance.

I have always loved the thrill of travel—the joy of being on the move, every single experience something new. In India, every blink of the eye, every inhale, every sound presented a different perspective from anything that I’d known before, and it brought me completely alive. Despite the harsh realities of life all around me, I had many moments of profound joy and wonder. Staring at the rickshaw photo, I started to feel melancholy, wondering, where is that kind of ecstatic joy in my life today?

The week before the photo was taken, had a profound experience in Varanasi: in a temple, I was suddenly overcome with intense emotion. Bells started ringing in all directions, someone started playing a drum set, and without warning I broke open, weeping uncontrollably. People stared, not in confusion, but with a curious understanding. As if this type of thing happens there all the time. Afterward I felt cleansed and clear, from the inside out. For the next few days, I walked a little more softly, worried a little less, judged a little less, gorged myself on the delicious food a little less.

Hedonist that I am, I’m tempted to think I just need to repeat that trip, go back to India, get myself another healing. Aside from the sadly greedy, grasping nature of the urge, I also know that it probably won’t work. I don’t think we can have these things when we seek them, want them, expect them. It is in the not-seeking that these experiences can take us by surprise, and in the surprising give us the change we need. Just like earthquakes: they never, ever happen when I am thinking about them.

Also, I am wrong—there have been countless moments of joy and adventure in my life since my trip to India eight years ago; there just isn’t anyone there taking my photo to record it. Field work in the High Sierra, the Big Sur Coast, and everywhere in between; camping under the Milky Way in the vast desert; the magic of living in Yosemite Valley in all four seasons; the nervous system-soothing tropical ocean breezes in Mexico: all places where I have taken several moments to stop and think, “what did I do to deserve this amazing life?” Alongside every single one of these memories are also recollections of the accompanying trials: the poison oak rashes, the muscle cramps, the cactus spines, the trenchfoot, the hapless visitors, the sunburn. This bitterness is what makes the moments of joy possible.

When I came across the Rishikesh rickshaw photo, I couldn’t stop staring into the eyes of my eight-years-younger self. The still image is full of movement. The people next to me are slightly blurry. But there I am in the middle, the bindi on my forehead the centerpiece. My smile of the rare, genuine sort. My eyes clear blue as glacial ice. In that instant, I am fully awake, aware, alive, and present in what is.

I may have looked just as joyful if you had taken a picture of me last summer as I was driving on a solo roadtrip across the Utah desert, singing to Dolly Parton with electricity in my veins and not a care in the world—no illicit substances required. The day before, I had just wrapped up a short but intense field season, and left the heat, the wildfire smoke, and the group dynamics behind for six weeks. Part of the elation was being relieved of the job that I love for a break to see family and friends, and spend some time alone with my thoughts and whatever the open road brought next.

In India, I simply showed up for whatever happened, because I knew I needed to surrender all expectations of comfort and time to travel with sanity. I got pure, unfettered joy as my reward. Today, leveling up this skill will require mustering this attitude while sitting at a computer screen, staring down the barrel of a dank peer review. I’m at my desk, thinking I know exactly what will happen next, how it will play out, but I really and truly don’t.

Travel is wonderful, but what I’ve learned from the joys of travel and adventure is that it’s the mindset of a willingness to be surprised that makes the joy possible. So, even in these long desk days, what if I saw each day as a new adventure, with new eyes, believing that whatever came my way would be a marvel, even if it was unpleasant, because I am alive and each breath is a gift? This time of year, I trade poison oak for peer reviews, sunburn for seasonal affective disorder, sore muscles for restlessness. But life can still be an adventure, even if I don’t leave home.

The Rishikesh autorickshaw ride, February 2014.

Reflections on a post-doc “gap” year

It’s been over a year since I defended my dissertation. About halfway through this year, after I had rattled off my eclectic work schedule and paltry list of formal postdoc applications, a friend and former lab mate suggested that this would simply be my “post-doc gap year”.

The name stuck, despite my updated impression that it’s a misnomer. This year has been anything but an unfilled space. It is, surely, a break in continuity—of academic enrollment; but, certainly not academic achievement or productivity. My two biggest first-authored scientific publications came out this year, for example. I participated in plenty of academic research, worked on manuscripts, analyzed data, and even taught an undergraduate course. So what was so un-academic about my post-doc “gap” year?

Colleagues conducting very serious research at the La Brea Tar Pits. May 2017.

Simply that I didn’t have an academic position. I was not a Postdoc, or Assistant Professor, or any other academic title that would serve the academic continuity between grad school and whatever academic achievement happens next. In the process, I found that much of academia has no problem asking other academics to work for free. True, most people in academia have an academic job that pays them to follow whatever pursuits will further their discipline and academic career, so the asking is commonplace. But when you’re one foot in and one foot out of academia, without a paid position, then you’re essentially free labor for whatever you commit yourself to.

Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park. July 2017.

I could have easily occupied myself with all of these academic commitments as a full-time job, had I any independent source of wealth to support me. Alas, I do not. So, I found myself saying “no” to a lot of requests, and even stepping down from a leadership role on some projects. Fortunately, this freed up time to pursue other interests that supported me financially, professionally, and personally. Unfortunately, it meant that I had to step away from work that I had invested considerable effort into already. Fortunately, my graduate school experience taught me to beware of the Concorde Fallacy.

Ash looks like snow in the creek bed near our house after the wildfire. December 2017.

In addition to juggling ongoing research projects, I took on some paying jobs that were fun, exciting, and very rewarding. Over the summer I worked for the National Park Service, doing backcountry ecological restoration work in the high Sierra Nevada. Living in the wilderness for two months helped clear my head, recover my body from too much time in front of the computer, and inspired me get my blog going. Returning home in the fall, I got a consulting job, conducting ecological restoration planning on federal lands. Over the winter, the largest wildfire in modern California history turned my life into a snow globe—as if someone picked it up and shook it, leaving everything to fall into a new place. And so it was with my priorities, both professional and personal. It became abundantly clear that life was too short and unpredictable to wait for the right opportunities to come along, and I embraced some interests that I had put on the back burner.

Taking my students to see California Condors at Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge. May 2017.

This spring, I started a position in the University of California Reserve System that is a perfect fit for my skills and has the bonus of being tied to a beautiful, ecologically important place. I am also teaching my Endangered Species Management course at UC Santa Barbara. This is the fourth time I’ve taught the course, and I love refining and improving it every year, while working with the individual needs of each year’s cohort of students.

Often, my desk is where I make it. Here, at UCSB's Sedgwick Reserve. April 2018.

Two of my former lab mates and I—both of them current postdocs—formed a weekly video chat check-in, where we give reports on our goals and support and encourage each other’s work. Since all three of us have graduated from the same lab in the last few years, it is a great way for us to stay accountable to ourselves and to each other in order to tackle our ambitious productivity goals.

More than anything, the past year has been filled with an extraordinary sense of freedom—of not having the Herculean task of finishing my dissertation hanging over me every single day. Before graduation, I measured a day’s success in how much I accomplished toward achieving that goal. Now, I am delighted to find each day has different priorities and tasks, most of which inspire and motivate me. This is the life I persisted through my PhD program to have.

During my first month of graduate school, I asked a postdoc in my lab if she thought all of the effort of finishing a PhD was worth it. She said, “More than anything else, it takes persistence—there will be times when you will want to give up. But if you don’t, again and again, eventually you will finish. And once you do, it feels incredible—unlike anything you’ve experienced.”

I couldn’t agree more.