Reflecting and Continuing

Thank you for reading this far.  Thank you for taking me in when I drove into your town.  Thank you for caring about me, and encouraging me.  You have made a really big difference in my life.

I don’t know how this story ends, of course, because I’m still traveling, still trying to move forward.  And as I write this, almost a year after I got back from 14,000 miles through 32 states and then two weeks in Namibia, I’m still mulling over what I did and what it meant and how it changed me.  I’ve been working on this essay all of that year:  I was that reluctant to name what all this meant, and maybe that full of ideas.  There’s a lot to say, and I’m trying to edit it down to the essential.

It seems important to me that I missed all of New England on my trip, the region where I grew up and that feels most like home to me.  Hmmm.  This, too:  most of the strangers I encountered on my journey seemed much more interested in telling me about themselves than in hearing about me, and my adventure.  Conveniently, I was much more interested in hearing about them than talking about myself.  There’s something significant there.  I also kept thinking about how we’re interconnected, as I traveled massive superhighways that link Amish people to movie stars to migrant farm workers to hedge fund managers, and saw signs about regional waterways that provide disparate people with drinking water, lawn-irrigation, factory power and someplace to dump waste, and shunted onto side roads when the superhighway needed repair or I wanted to reach a small town.

Maybe I’ll write about those ideas sometime.  But what I want to explore now, and try to explain, is how I felt for a moment in Portland.  K.B. asked me why I was traveling to the coast, instead of going straight south, or something like that.  I said, “Because I want to.”  She leaned forward, stared, and said, “Oh, I love that answer.”  It’s not always been the first one to fall out of my mouth – and I love it, too.

When I was in middle school, my mum got several of her kids swimming a bit more seriously than the ocean dog-paddling I’d been doing since infancy.  I earned my junior lifesaving and advanced swimmer certificates, and took a diving class.  Swimming was easy, fun, natural – except underwater; I am just not a good breath holder – diving was not.  Forward dives were okay, because they got me into the water, though always with the slight worry I might miss my aim and smack down too hard.  Then there was the day we were supposed to do backward dives.

I stood at the end of the board, facing the wrong way, and, as instructed, started a back-bend, my hands together over my head.  Then I was supposed to push off, just the littlest bit, with my feet, and trust that my body would obey gravity and physics and cleave smoothly through the water I couldn’t see below me.  I could not do it.

I was pretty flexible, and the instructor was delighted with my back-bend.  “Yes, that’s right,” she called from the tiling.  “Now just let go.”  I straightened up instead.  She offered some more encouragement, and I went into an even deeper back-bend.  “That’s great,” she said, “That’s more than enough.  Now just let yourself go.”  Then I straightened up again, alarmed by how the diving board was wobbling.  And then I tried again: backbend, reassurance from instructor, deep breath, straighten up again.  I have never done a backward dive.

 

I rode my bike no hands, down steep hills.  I didn’t go to gym class for three quarters, and flunked phys ed in my junior year of high school.  Rather than go to summer school, for gym, I dropped out and went straight into college.  I walked home from T.T. the Bear’s at two in the morning, alone.  I loved a Seamus Heaney poem so I worked three years for the money to go to grad school in Ireland, arriving there with two huge suitcases and nowhere to live.  I am not the fraidiest cat in the litter.

And yet...

By my mid-40s I had opted for a long-term relationship with a good guy, a house in the suburbs, and a career that did not engage me fully.  My life was okay, with lots of stress and disappointment, many moments of pure joy, plenty of drudgery and an occasional adventure.  Whenever I read a newspaper, I imagined myself in a different life, with greater engagement – intellectual and emotional – in work and people and places that really excited me.  But I stuck with what I had, until forces apparently outside me ripped it all away.

So my journey is a story of transition, maybe – but everyone’s life is a story of transition; change is constant and change is transition, so transition is constant.  No matter how static you feel, your cells are always dividing, your eyesight is worsening, your bank balance is fluctuating, your patience is waxing and waning.  No one with children can claim to be stuck in place; nor anyone with aging parents, siblings, friends.

This is a story of more dramatic transition than most of us experience in a typical year.  A lot of our transitions – from parents of pre-schoolers to parents of college students to grandparents; from trainee to manager to director to V.P. – are so gradual we may need to pull back from the day-to-day to recognize them.  When I describe the spring of my 49^th year to people, they usually respond with widened eyes and some variation on, “Yowza.”  But we are all living yowza every day.  We just don’t notice, or we’d go into sensory overload.  So some moments, I shall try to notice better, and aim to yowza in the right direction for me.

About that right direction:  since you are reading this, you are probably a friend of mine, and therefore do not look to me for advice or inspiration or grand conclusions.  Good thing, since I have none, and I doubt you would believe or trust them if I did.  I am glad you wouldn’t, because I think that the main thing I – ‘learned’ is the wrong word.  The main thing I knew already but had resisted accepting, and that crystallized for me in the course of this trip, is that I know what is right for me.  I suspect each of us knows what is right, and that the specifics vary widely:  have kids or don’t, run away to join the circus or keep drudging on with the boring job because it allows you to spend weekends perfecting the trapeze routine that is your joy and inspiration, travel the world or spend as much time as you have becoming intimately familiar with one small piece of it, and everything in between.

Some of us, though – I’m a Virgo and an INTP, if that helps – resist that small certainty, because we don’t trust ourselves.  Instead we look to outside sources for advice.  Well, as of today I don’t believe much in general prescriptions.  “Running is good for you.”  “Running is terrible for your joints.”  “Have a career before you have kids.”  “Family comes first.”  “Go west, young man.”  Maybe Emily Dickinson would have been happier if she had left the handsome house in Amherst and ridden all the way to Pittsburgh, but maybe she would have had a nervous breakdown if she had traveled much.  I’m sure there are lots of people who benefit by doing one thing every day that scares them, but I bet Eleanor Roosevelt’s poster-worthy advice is a lousy suggestion for others.

I loved my trip.  It helped my soul to grow and flourish.  I don’t know whether you can tell by looking at me, but I changed for the better, and I hope for good.  Quitting your career and driving all over the place and connecting with stranger-friends might be a lousy choice for you, though.  But I guess I do have some advice, after all.  Do it if the idea sings inside you.  If the idea doesn’t, find a quiet place and wait for a little while, and when something comes into your mind or your feelings that does sing inside you, do that instead.  Maybe this is following your bliss, or seizing the moment; I don’t know.  And maybe the best thing you can do in your life is to drown your own ambitions in sacrifice to your family or your retirement savings.  But you are the only one who knows for sure, and you are the only one whom you should trust absolutely.

A religious friend, listening to me talk about how right events and decisions suddenly felt, how comfortable I was becoming in my changing skin, said enthusiastically, “Oh, He’s got a plan for you!  You’ll be a believer yet!”  But I never felt like I was getting signals from God.  It was always signs from the universe, for me.  And that, for me, is really just a joking shorthand for trusting myself.  I know what I want.  I’m not certain I deserve it, or can have it, or can handle it, but I know what’s right for me.

And that is actually a really hard thing for me to admit in public.  So please don’t ever mention it.

This trip was not a spiritual quest, nor even a psychological one.  It was a celebration, an emotional healing (the old, sick, beloved cat died in that summer of changes, and that ripped my heart apart like no boyfriend, boss or lost home ever could) and an awakening to a golden, glowing, rippling grassland of possibilities.

From the moment it sprang from my brain like Athena, full-grown and armored, the plan for this trip felt right.  The idea resonated in me.  If you’re musical, you know this feeling because it’s what happens when you get the right note in the right key, and resolve to the tonic.  I’m not musical, so it took me a long time, even though I knew from the second I heard them that Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson are designed to harmonize on ‘Roam.’

I sometimes get this when I’m cooking – I sauté shallots and mushrooms and rosemary, and pile them on caramelized onion on a thick slab of rye toast, and eat the sandwich with a glass of St. Emilion, and every separate element of the meal is transformed; exponentially better than fried mushrooms or wine alone.  Harmony.  That’s what it is.  Your true wants, your true needs, your real feelings all line up with what you’re providing yourself, and life becomes the dinner party where the guests haven’t met before but laugh and laugh and laugh.  Or the synchronicity of lavender-green ocean under blue sky with pale gold sand and white-foaming waves, sunshine or moonshine and a light breeze with the scent of honeysuckle.

The certainty I felt about this trip, the liberty and joy I felt while traveling, have modulated a bit.  I bought a cottage in a new town, and I second-guess that choice often.  I’ve volunteered for the Peace Corps, and they’re going to send me to Namibia in the spring of 2015.  I wonder whether I’ll hate being far away from home, living in dirt and dust without enough water or electricity or confidence.  Those feelings go into abeyance, though, when I pick up the Peace Corps fingerprint form for my background check and feel excited all over.  I quit my career, I traveled the country, I chose to move 7,000 miles from home, because I want to.  I know it, and I trust it, and I loved what I’ve done and I’m excited about what’s ahead.  Thank you again – you contributed to this, and I am so grateful.  I wish you joy.