Away We Go: Temporary

Just passing through.

Twenty years ago, it’s what I thought I was doing in the town where I was certainly not going to stay. When people would ask where I was from I would add “for now.” As if that held any weight after living in the same place for double digits.

Then, abruptly, we were living on the road. New campgrounds every three to seven days. New cities, grocery stores, roads, lakes, trails. I doubled the number of apps on my phone and was never more grateful for navigation. I could like a place without loving it, I could converse with people at campgrounds with ease because there were no long-reaching consequences. No calculation about what kind of person they were or relationship we would have.

Being temporary made me far more present than setting down roots.

Now we have chosen our next home. But strangely, it’s in a place where many of the people are here only for a week or a season. I will be permanent in a place where others are less so.

What makes a temporary thing so alluring? Why is it that if I know I’m going to be here only for a few years it takes the pressure off? Knowing there's an end date means that I don't have to consider ten years in advance when I ask a fellow mom a question on the playground?

It speaks to the vulnerability phobia. Even if something embarrassing happens I'll be able to escape anyone who knew about it in short order. Like what should have happened in places where the end is predictable, like college. Caution should have gone out the window. But then I had the wisdom of an eighteen year old and now I’ve got another twenty years on her. She did what she thought was best at the time and that was to close off, to not engage, to not participate and therefore to avoid all potentially embarrassing situations. To ensure that there was no external confirmation of what she knew internally to be true: that she wasn’t enough.

I sat in my fifth floor room with a window looking across the entire campus and listened to all of them with their shouts of laughter and their yelling at each other and their singing and playing frisbee and I watched. I knew that there were incredible people to be friends with right next to me, dozens of them, and I knew I was missing out.

Some of these feelings are coming back now that I’m in a mountain town. With many of the same personalities, many like me, just twenty years down the line. I struggle mightily with believing that if I’m not the best (and I never have been so I have no idea where this is coming from) then I shouldn’t even show up. Trail running club is a terrifying prospect because I am so very slow. And what have I been doing with my life that I’ve run most days of it and I’m still not very fast?

I can’t remember in those times that the snow comes and goes. There’s a curtain of it high on the mountain but halfway through the run you see your shadow. There’s evidence of the sun. The same is true with someone else judging me. I logically know everyone is judging themselves and far to wrapped up in navel gazing to take much notice. But the fear of being the butt of the joke for even a split second has meant that I have taken so much less from the people around me than I could have. I haven’t engaged. I have missed so, so, so very much to stay out of the light because the spots of dark scared me so much.

It’s not fair. To me, who could have learned and experienced so much from the luminous humans around me. And to the people in my orbit because although flawed, I have a lot to offer.

It should work, then, to know I'm going to die. (Whoa, you’re thinking. That’s a hard right into mortality). But it’s far too abstract to know that this life has an end date sometime in the future. The uncertainty of timing takes the sharp edge off until there's a lump or a wreck or a friend missing at dinner.

For now we are here in this temporary place. I’m resolved to not repeat my past self - It’s inevitable, I know will, but I’ll fight harder this time. Maybe I’ll pretend like we’re leaving in a few weeks and go from there. Maybe I’ll think about what it would be like if today was it. I’d watch the sun blink behind the mountains. I’d smile at the hiss of my breath made visible by the winter. I’d marvel at a perfectly executed turn on swishy snow. And maybe forgive myself a few of the missed things in favor of only this one breath.

Inspired by an experience in Park City, Utah.