Sunday, I photographed some caribou close to my home.
As I photographed them, a couple looked curiously at me, but they didn’t seem particularly interested or disinterested by my presence. Instead, they moseyed. They moseyed across a field and across the road. They moseyed into someone else’s yard and they moseyed toward their next snack.
There’s a dictionary definition for moseying. It’s not very interesting.
Mosey isn’t just a verb, it’s a state of mind, a vibe, an invocation of something greater.
To mosey is to go with the flow, to get where you’re going not now but later. It’s something that I respect in part because I’m not sure that I have access to it.
I truly can’t imagine slowing down and taking each moment as it comes half as well as those caribou do, or even just the people around me.
I’m a sicko for a densely packed plan that optimizes each individual moment for maximum yield of experience and fun. I’ve written before about being so scared of losing time that I’m failing to recognize its moments as they pass. Nothing makes me sweat more than the limited days and months of the Kenai Peninsula summer.
It’s spring now. At least, I think it is — it did snow yesterday.
As much as I’ll miss heavy jackets and cozy sweaters, I’m finding the lengthening days and sort-of warming temperatures unusually reinvigorating this year. It feels like there’s a lot to be excited for — so very much moseying to do.
Spring represents potential, to me. We’re four months into 2024 but right now is when it’s finally getting started. The last few weeks in the newsroom have been hilariously busy and there’s more on the horizon than there are hours in the day.
As I look forward, I’d like to start writing things into my planner — in pen. I want to know that I’ll make the most of it. But it’s impossible to know now whether I’ll actually make the most of it until the time has come and gone.
I’m not sure what this summer will look like, but, intrinsically, I know there’s not much point in stressing about it. Fun and opportunity will come, and all I’ve gotta do is mosey through every day and seize those moments as they arrive — there will be ample chances to smile, myriad nights worth remembering.
I’d like to see Seldovia for the first time. I’d like to get through as many of the hikes in Taz Tally’s “50 Hikes in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula” as possible. I’d like to play video games and watch movies.
I’d like to remember to mosey through it all.
Reach reporter Jake Dye at jacob.dye@peninsulaclarion.com.
