Inner and outer journeys are often connected. When I am paying attention to my life, I can see this better.
My family has been doing literal traveling this week–and that traveling feels like a physical expression of an inner journey that began for us earlier this summer (and maybe even longer in some ways).
In early June, my husband and I traveled to Dallas for a wedding and stopped in for a service at a cathedral before going back home. The priest prayed for travelers and anointed all of us for our respective journeys ahead. As the oil hit my head that day, the moment felt so much more significant than just preparing to hop on a plane for a two-hour flight back home.
And it proved to be so.
About 2 weeks later, our family made the decision to move back to our hometown to be closer to family–and the summer journey ramped up in all senses of the word.
Rental home and school enrollment and construction, oh my!
We began our two-day trip to a beach vacation this past Friday. While we drove, I pondered all the outer and inner demolition of my home and heart. Everything in my life felt under construction and I felt displaced.
We technically have two homes right now–one rental and one we own that is being prepared to put on the market– but we’re transitioning and not really settled in either one.
It makes me think of the literal transition phase of childbirth where contractions pile one on top of another with no breaks in between–the body almost in the pushing phase, but not quite. Transition was a phase where pretty much all I felt as a laboring mother was pain. For me, pushing always brought some physical and emotional relief because a baby was finally coming, but the transition phase was always just the tremendous pain of preparing for it all.
The moving transition we are in feels like that in an emotional sense– mostly pain with a healthy dose of loneliness in the mix while being between two communities.
On our second day of driving, I noticed a marked change in my thoughts though. The heaviness from Friday didn’t altogether vanish, but it seemed to lighten and shift toward creative projects and ideas. I thought about sketchbook, writing and business ideas. I thought about books I wanted to read and organizing projects I wanted to do. My inner life seemed to shift into creative overdrive, though I wasn’t sure why.
We stopped at my sister’s house in North Carolina on our long drive and I asked her theory about the noticeable shift in my headspace from Friday to Saturday.
“Maybe you’re just leaving some of the pain and stress behind,” she offered. That felt true.
In all of life, I aim to travel light materially, but sometimes the emotional and spiritual baggage is harder to let go. Sometimes I don’t even know how. But, when I call to mind the connection between outer and inner experiences, it makes sense that a literal, physical journey would be the way to process an inner journey.
A beach trip can become more than a vacation, but also a healing journey if I approach it that way.
I suppose transitions will always be a mixed bag of tearing down and rebuilding. But, my hope is that this trip might be a fulcrum in our larger transition where we can go from mostly tearing down to mostly rebuilding.
It’s hard to be unsure of what life will look like on the other side of a bittersweet transition. But, my prayer is that, no matter what life looks like on the outside, the inner changes that happen in the process will be worth all the labor and effort.
