I wanted to travel. I wanted adventure. I wanted to break free, break out, run away, run back, get lost, be found.
And here am I.
So here is what I have at last formulated beyond tired ambling ramblings. Sometimes you have to get out of everything you know, to find something within you that seems like yourself once more.
I had fallen deeply into a rut. Everything was banal, routine, old, sad, too familiar, and worse too reminscent of memories I didn't want to remember. Where was I in all of the old? I cannot say if this is true for everyone, but I don't think I am that different from anyone else.
It may surprise you, but I am a homebody at heart. Although, home, is wherever I have that I've made my own, to rest, to dream, to create, to return to when the day is long. I knew at the end of last year, however, that I was no longer home. I felt a strange robotic sense of waking, eating, doing, sleeping. Nothing felt magical. I knew that I was somewhere inside the routine, inside myself, but I could no longer tell you who "me" was.
Sometimes, it helps to be unfamiliar with everything if only to relearn to take the time to explore, to take care of yourself once more, to have an urgent all encompassing need to inquire while getting lost. Getting lost is good…. it helps you to ascertain what you're trying to find.
I know a bit more than when I blindly arrived here. I had no travel guides, no books, had read no words of advice before I arrived. I am not unlike a bird in a nest who sometimes needs a slight boot to gently kick me from my little abode. I needed something to jar me awake.
I needed to rest. I needed to find something funny once more. I needed to laugh at myself. I needed to walk instead of taking the car. I needed to be less familiar and force myself to ask once more: where am I? And when people ask me have something to answer when they ask: Who are you?
Like any lessons, the learning has been exultant, tragic, painful (I fell when boarding my bus this evening, hurting the knee that I hurt oh so many years ago …oh, did I cry!!), and embarassing … sometimes….
But… I am listening once more. To myself. To others. And to the places and their stories. Or, the stories, and the places they just happen to occur…
I am taking nothing for granted.
Hugs always,
T
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