Vacation Drive

We are traveling down the turnpike with amazing views of rock formations and mountains as I realize I am the one forcing this trip.  I guess I knew I was, I just didn’t really care. 

I need to go home.  I want the comfort of familiarity and family.  We are isolated.  Not just in where we live, but in our separation from what used to be home and all of the people and places that made it so. 

Why is this so important to me?  It will be costly in time, energy and money, and will be a strain on everyone.  But I need to heal and rejuvenate, and I feel like there is not enough time to be had to do it.  There is too much that needs to be done before the end of my vacation for me to be back where I need to be, body and soul, to be ready for what lies ahead.  There are so many decisions to be made, and that is part of what this trip is about for me.  Returning home helps me feel my roots before once again spreading my wings to carry me where I want to go in life.  Will this help or will it hurt?  I don’t know, probably both. 

The other thing I need to realize is that healing doesn’t stop because vacation is over; neither does the revitalization that we all need. If I take care of that continually, with regular maintenance, then it won’t take so much or so long for me to heal.  That would also mean that these vacations would take on a different purpose than they have in the past.  Either way, I know I am at a crossroads.

I can stay where I am or I can go somewhere new.  The question I struggling with is if it makes sense to go now or wait a year.  I plan to pursue another degree program shortly, so I want to be sure that whatever move I make will fit into that, but also will be the right move for my job, as well as what is best for my spouse.  No one ever said life was this complicated when you grow up. 

I remember wanting, desperately, to hurry up and be a grown-up already.  Everyone told me to stop rushing, it would happen soon enough, but I didn’t believe them.  It just couldn’t get here soon enough.  I was certain that adulthood had to be better than childhood, and certainly had to be better than the teen-age years.  I know people that would trade anything to be 16 again.  Why?!  I didn’t think it was all that great, but then I think they made more of that experience than I did.  If I could do it again, it would be so I could do it differently.  But that’s my point.  I don’t feel like I really took advantage of former stages in my life, so now I want to live fully in my current stage, but I don’t want to screw up future stages.  Maybe that’s the whole point.  When you’re 16, you don’t really care about what you will be doing when you’re 30 or 40 or 50, you just care about what you are doing that day, and the next.  Teenagers are the epitome of living in the moment.  They just are.  They live a lifetime in a single moment.  What adults call ‘drama’ is really just a Zen-like state of embracing one’s current condition and state.  It’s just that Zen is usually thought of as peaceful, not yelling, shouting, screaming, crying, and throwing a fit because your boyfriend of two weeks just called another girl, and now your life is over.  Why can’t Zen have a little shouting?  It is part of living in the moment.  Maybe not to the extent one would as a person going through the tempest of puberty, but tempered with the wisdom of knowing that no matter what is happening in the moment, it doesn’t have to change who or what you are unless you allow it to, and that things may be better or worse in another 5 minutes, hour, day, week or month.  Time will tell if it is good fortune or bad, if it was a good choice or a poor. 

We shall see.