VACATIONS WORK!

FIELD NOTES FROM A PEAK EXPERIENCE.

by The Accidental Initiate.

I mean, they really work—not because I did anything spectacular, but because I didn’t.

Somewhere between the second unplanned turn on a back road and the third cup of coffee gone cold in my lap, I realized I had recovered something I thought I’d misplaced forever: the ability to fall in love again. Not with a person (don’t panic), but with a song.

Recorded in a tunnel under Prospect Park, Brooklyn — proof that peak experiences don’t always happen on mountaintops. Sometimes they echo off tile walls and catch you mid-stride, same as they did me.

It ambushed me, same way these things always do. The tune unspooled across my ribs like an old river finding its bed again, carrying something I didn’t know I was missing. I didn’t even care if I wore it out on repeat. Songs worth loving don’t mind repetition—they return, same as birds in spring.

Last minute, I’d thrown a book into my pack—a Colin Wilson I’d been eyeing for months, half out of guilt and half out of hope. I didn’t realize until I opened it in the woods that it was a padded reissue of one I already owned (bought used, coffee-stained, a few bucks)… but here’s the kicker: my older copy’s autographed. Wilson’s spidery scrawl still warm, somehow.

Funny thing about the cover: the colors are inverted. Flip them in your mind and suddenly Colin Wilson’s silhouette is wearing what looks suspiciously like one of our Council’s yellow neck gaiters. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe proof that even the great British mystics were halfway to the Pennsylvania Wilds without knowing it.

Reading him out there—surrounded by leaves, the song looping in my head—he felt alive. The man’s voice on the page was so clear and immediate I could swear it had a British accent. Immortality, I guess, isn’t so much about not dying as it is about speaking plain enough that someone hears you decades later.

These moments aren’t summoned; they descend. The great paradox: you can’t force peak experiences, you can only prepare to be ambushed by them. And when they come, they remind you—quietly, absurdly—that joy is still possible, even if you forgot where you left it.

—The Accidental Initiate