Dedicated to my Laura and Alex and their best friend, Katie
I bought the lavender Life is Good shirt with that phrase dead center at least 7 years ago. I still wear it whenever I can, usually putting a zip up sweatshirt over it to prolong wearing the short sleeves into the winter; okay, and to hide the darkened underarms (what can I say, I’ve walked at least 100 miles in that shirt, and it shows). My cousins Laura and Alex and their friend Katie are embarking on an adventure, consciously wandering from Florida to Seattle (Laura is already there and Alex and Katie are joining her shortly), and during a recent phone conversation with Alex, this phrase kept coming into my head as I encouraged her to grab the experience and run with it.
As a side note, I can’t resist explaining that Laura and Alex are much more than cousins to me. I know mothers out there will say it isn’t possible until you have your own, but often, I say I genuinely understand a mother’s love for her children because of how I feel about them. It’s a love so deep it brings me to tears just thinking about it and typing it. I have changed their diapers, babysat them during summers, watched them grow, and shared mini-adventures with them. I feel a protectiveness of them unlike anything I have known and such a pure desire to see them take this life and make it what they want it to be that I can only liken it to motherhood. The good thing is that we have a bond like sisters, so it’s fun and easy, and I can keep my crazy protectiveness under wraps. Okay, side note finished. (And by the by, please don’t take this paragraph as an invitation to convince me why I should have kids. I can have these strong feelings and still choose not to be a mother).
Consciously wandering; yes, that’s where I was. We all have different paths to forge in life, but some of us like to test more than one path before making a decision on where we belong. We don’t wander because we avoid making decisions or because we can’t choose; we wander because we don’t want to be restricted to a path before we’re ready. So, we travel up this one and that one, testing them out, trying them on to see if they fit, and when they don’t, we turn around-- appreciative of what we learned-- but ready to move on. Some of us test out jobs in this way; some of us move a lot; some of us travel; some of us do the unexpected, like drop out of college for a while; some of us (like me) do all of these things. And because I know how much courage it takes to consciously wander and how many people misunderstand our need to do it, I leave my girls with this:
We are wanderers, but we are not lost. We know exactly where we are at all times. And in the end, when we do find that path where we belong, we know ourselves inside and out. We have created ourselves, in fact, instead of letting the pre-defined or status quo paths create us. Some paths we choose are not easy, but we learn as much from the pain and challenge of these experiences as we do from the joy of others. Sometimes, we end up right back where we started, realizing we belonged there all along, but richer for the journey and peaceful in the knowledge that we chose this place instead of it choosing us.
But do you want to know the most surprising thing about wanderers? We understand that, in the end, we can never be trapped by where we are; we can only be trapped by who we are*. And that’s why we are never lost.
*Phrase appropriately stolen from a rock I bought on Big Sur in California during one of my conscious wandering trips.
