i almost bulldozed a 90-year-old woman for Tom Kitten

The average visitor spends about an hour touring Beatrix Potter’s house.

I made it through in seven minutes.

In my defense, I truly don’t believe anyone was spending an hour in there. And if you were, you should probably be put on some type of watch list.

The town was beautiful, and the house itself was charming. The sixty seconds I gave myself to sit and take it in felt almost magical.

One thing I will complain about is the parking. Every spot at the welcome center was taken. There was a one-way loop, and the person in front of me had stopped in the middle of it to take pictures, pose for selfies and fiddle with his GPS while a line of cars queued up behind him.

Tourists. Am I right?

Anyway, I ended up parking in a hotel lot next door with signs that very clearly said HOTEL PARKING ONLY everywhere. But I was operating under the assumption that if I moved quickly enough, consequences would never catch up to me.

Naturally, I sped through every room.

I cut off little kids. I almost bulldozed a ninety-year-old woman to see the figurine that inspired Tom Kitten. I have never read Tom Kitten. I took all the pictures necessary to prove that I had stood in the bedroom of an author whose work I had enjoyed exactly once when I was five.

Then I got the hell out of dodge.

Or at least as quickly as a rental car can flee a literary landmark on a one-lane country road.

By the time I got back to my car, I was depleted and completely horrified by my own behavior. I had wrestled a family of four to see the desk where Beatrix Potter wrote Peter Rabbit, sprinted back to my car so I wouldn’t get a ticket and forgot to eat in the process. It was also the first moment since waking up six hours earlier that I had a chance to gather my thoughts.

Sitting in that parking lot, dizzy from hunger and overstimulated from trying to cram an entire county into a single afternoon, I realized something strange.

I had traveled an hour on winding, unpaved, one-way roads to visit the home of one of the most beloved children’s authors of all time, and I was speed-walking through it because I had other places to be.

The irony wasn’t that I had rushed through Beatrix Potter’s house. It was that Beatrix Potter built an entire career noticing things most people walked past. Rabbits in gardens, sheep on hillsides, tiny details hidden in plain sight. And there I was, practically jogging through her bedroom.

What exactly was I racing toward?

It occurred to me that I had become very good at arriving places and considerably worse at lingering.

Meanwhile, the thing I had actually traveled across the world for, the feeling of being there, barely had time to catch up with me.

At the time, I laughed it off. I like being busy. It’s a new place. I have so much to see. It’s perfectly normal to feel like a saber-toothed tiger is chasing you through the English countryside.

But the more I thought about it, the more that afternoon felt strangely familiar.

A few weeks before England, I caught myself skimming a book I was genuinely enjoying because I had a stack of five other books I wanted to read. I couldn’t get through it fast enough, which, if you know me, is a dramatic shift.

I kept SparkNotes in business back in high school.

And that wasn't the only observation. Somehow, I had managed to turn my hobbies into errands.

It happened again this morning.

I woke up before sunrise because I wanted to watch the sun come up. But I also wanted to go for a walk and do some writing before my day started.

I sat down and watched the sky change colors. It was beautiful.

About ninety seconds later, I got up and left, having apparently seen all the sunrise I needed to see.

Why?

To get to the walk that could have waited five extra minutes?

To get to the writing that wasn’t going anywhere?

To move on to the next thing?

I wasn’t entirely sure.

I always assumed this impulse came from control. Twenty-year-old me would be mortified by the control freak I seem to have become.

But the problem with narratives is that once they explain us, we often stop looking and mistake them for the whole story.

For years, I was looking for the quickest way to speed the day up. The closest thing to consume in order to avoid my feelings. The easiest way to hide.

Now I seem to be trying to fit three days into one.

I have books I want to read, places I want to visit, things I want to write and ideas I want to chase. In an effort not to sound corny, and probably failing, I am genuinely excited about my days lately.

Not just on occasion.

Every single day.

For the past three months.

I’m doing more of what I want to do and living more the way I want to live.

Is it perfect? No.

Is it exactly how I envisioned my life? Certainly not.

But is it me?

Getting there.

Maybe that’s why this feels so confusing.

When I rushed through Beatrix Potter’s house, I assumed I was being impatient. When I couldn’t sit still at sunrise, I assumed I was distracted.

When I caught myself racing toward the next thing, I assumed I wasn’t present enough.

But what if part of the story is simpler than that?

What if I’m excited?

What if, after years of waiting for the sun to set, I’m finally hoping it takes its time?

I’ll probably still work on slowing down a little and spending more than seven minutes in museums going forward.

But I think I’ll also start being a little kinder to the person who’s excited.