A Week Away

This is a familiar ritual. I decide it's time to get some sleep, so I turn off the lights and lay in bed for about an hour. Then, after rolling around and re-situating pillows and trying to shut up my mind, I find myself here, typing about the thoughts that are keeping me awake.

Tonight those thoughts are about exploring. This is undoubtedly because we leave for California in one week, but I wasn't thinking about roadtrips or LA. I was thinking about ships and New Worlds and the ocean blue in 1492. I was thinking about what it would feel like to step onto a foreign shore, aware of the possibility that no one had ever stepped there before. In one of those recent costume dramas about European queens with big dresses, I forget which one, there's a thoroughly compelling scene in which a famous explorer comes back from the New World and describes to the queen what it was like to approach an uncharted continent and explore it. I watched that wanting so badly to be that explorer...minus all the exploitation and murder and thievery and such that would follow. It would be a rush, doing something that no one from your land had ever done before. Something new.

I have this persistent fear that I will wake up in forty years and realize that my life has been completely ordinary. Maybe that's part of what is driving me out West. More than that, though, more than fear, I think I'm compelled by hope...hope that I will learn and grow and find something new and be inspired and inspire and share. And maybe a little curiosity. Top it off with some general restlessness, and we've got a move to California.

So we leave next Sunday. Our trip will take us to familiar places in Florida and Georgia, then unfamiliar places around the country, with bikes in D.C., sailboats and lobsters in Maine, potential new friends in Michigan, a farm in Winnipeg, camping in Montana, coffee in Seattle, hiking in Oregon, and eventually, sometime in September, Los Angeles. I'm not yet sure what's waiting at the end of the trip, but I'm thrilled about the people we'll meet and the new things we'll see on the way.

I've been ignoring this space intentionally for the past few weeks. I was using the time to catch up with family and old friends, to reflect on the last four years in Jacksonville, and to dream about the next stage in LA. Somehow I feel like a blog might have taken away from all of that. But I'm excited about using this to share our trip with you, to whatever extent that is possible. And maybe I'll get back in the habit of writing up the occasional random thought or story to put on here as well.

That being said, I think I'll try to sleep again. Goodnight.