‘I have never really known what path I wanted my life to take, and I don’t think I really found it until I was already in the middle of the road.’
I wrote this on December 16, exactly one week before I left the ship that had so quickly become home to me.
As this ‘new’ semester comes to a close all I can seem to think of is the previous one.
They don’t tell you what it feels like to reach your peak and then come down. Or how to come back to normalcy after living in a dream for 110 days. They try to prepare you, but after 114 days away, it still feels like home.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve been gone for longer than I got to be there in the first place. It doesn’t matter that I’m in the middle of three big production projects or that I just decided to find somewhere new to live next year or that I work full time some weeks or that I have really great friends here.
Not a day, not even half a day, goes by where I don’t think in depth about every. single. thing. I left behind me.
I still wake up expecting to have crashed in a friend’s room, only to be alone (but probably still late for class). I still long for the sound of crashing waves to put me to sleep. I find solace in similarities I find now between places that I am to places I once was.
In my car, on the way back down to school this January, ‘Thank You Next’ came on my playlist. I heard it for the first time on a bus in Myanmar and can’t help but associate the two. The bridge I was driving across in that moment looked eerily similar to one that our bus had to stop at because it was too heavy to safely get across. So we all got off the bus, waited for it to cross the bridge, and walked.
That’s a little like life- sometimes you just have to cross the bridge even if you have to let go of some extra weight. Whatever it takes to get across.
That song playing while I crossed such a similar bridge felt significant. Like the universe was reaching out, letting me know that not everything had changed as much as I felt it had. So thank you to all my past experiences, and on to the next. (;
On my way back from Ireland in February, between my last layover and Alabama, I slept better than I had since getting back to Ohio in December. We had insane turbulence, but I fell asleep immediately because it reminded me of the sea swells I so desperately missed. Sometimes being shaken up a little is a good thing.
At work, in March, while I was dust-mopping our event pavilion, walking up and down in even rows, I had an intense moment of deja-vu. I realized how reminiscent that moment was of my walking meditation session in Myanmar and took that as a reminder that nothing in life is linear. Moments are not just gone once they end. They come back to us in strange ways that we might not have imagined.
They also change in our memory. We become fonder of some moments, more forgiving of others.
India was so hard at the time, it challenged us all in unique ways and we took comfort in knowing that we were not alone in our struggle there. Now, it is a place that comes up so often when I think of times I’ve felt pure joy. Something about the struggle brought us all closer than we knew at the time, a gift that can only be appreciated in retrospect. Dancing our hearts out with local people in a restaurant after 42.5 hours awake and really only 2 meals was the epitome of seizing the moment.
I’d been to Spain, so I was not as excited for it as some other places. I thought I knew what I would be getting out of that country, and I came up short in my preconceptions. Not only did I see new beauty, especially through the eyes of my travel companions, I made (and strengthened already-growing) friendships with some of the best people I will ever know.
We think of moments that are life changing, and think that means our whole life will change. What is more difficult to grasp is the idea that our personal worlds change, not the world we know. You can go on the greatest adventure imaginable and still come back and live at home, or return to old friends, or decide to keep moving and create a new part of your world. It’s all up to us what we do.
That doesn’t mean we forget those before or close ourselves off to those who will come after. It just means that moments stay with us, the good the bad and the beautiful, so embrace every moment of it all, and find people who will do the same.
Life has a way of giving us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. I’m not religious per say, but I believe with everything in me that the universe works in ways that we can only hope to understand one day.
I have never felt as justified in that belief as I did sitting on the back of Deck 8- emailing an old friend from home that embodies the notion of past, present, and future- feeling the darkness of the ocean and sky melting to one all around me, held together only by the stars.
Anything in that moment was possible. The world was mine.
I have never felt it as much as when one of my best friends and I jumped up and down like idiots on Deck 9 every time the boat rocked, acting as if the winds might just blow us away into oblivion.
Every sunset that I got to watch in its entirety- rising from this golden orb in the bright blue sky and fading away into the depth of the night- showed me what it means to really be alive.
It’s been a long time now, and if I’m being honest, I’m still not ready to be back. I could have lived in those moments forever, feeling all of the beauty and joy and community that were oh so tangible.
I learned to really see the world around me from the intersection of the equator and prime meridian at 0° 0° to the tops of mountains and the middle of wonders of the world and of nature, to cities that are some of the world’s greatest and villages that you couldn’t even find on a map.
My world changed. It keeps changing. It won’t ever stop changing.
I circumnavigated the globe.
I lived the life I had always dreamt of.
I found myself in the middle of the road, realizing my path would take about 1,000 more turns and that the destination is in the journey itself.
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