around the world in a year.
we unfolded maps, swallowed vaccines, poured over travel-insurance, sold even our garden rocks, and i saw the dentist 6 times for an embarrassing number of cavities (the hygenist decided i needed a flossing lesson)... tick-tock, the 2008 calendar barely still hangs on my living room wall, and our bags are almost packed (almost!). we have tickets, passports, and now we have plans.
plans. ivan and i, not unlike everyone else, have a knack of watching plans unfold in no way shape or form resembling our original ideas. it’s not that somehow we don't launch into creating idea after idea after... it’s just that as we begin to do so, the universe has a way of, well -
anyway, we are used to it now. certainly events in my life before we met had already schooled me in this:
make plan. cheer plan. see God change plan. like plan?...cheer God. dislike plan?...boo God.
humans are funny. or, i am a funny human.
people have different ideas about God and what God's main interests are. try polling sometime. one of my thoughts is that God's main interest in these situations isn’t whether or not we initially cheer or boo (and booing is, i’ve noticed, quite a normal human reaction to unexpected changes in life). there’s just too many factors involved in any one situation and that make up any one person for us to imagine that uniform reactions could be expected. no, i think God’s greater interest in these moments is quite simply this: waking us up.
humans love to sleep, and the task to keep us awake is a sizeable one. one perhaps better left to angels.
“Some people don’t know that there are angels whose only job is to make sure you don’t fall asleep and miss your life.”
that’s from Brian Andreas, an artist whose work i stumbled on about ten years ago; his quirky colorings make me stop every time i pass a shop that offers a display.
spiritual teachers in every tradition on every continent and in every age have been telling us to wake up! i like Fathers Thomas Keating, Merton, and Anthony de Mello for this. ivan likes Pema Chodron, among others. but somehow, staying awake remains impossible for me to sustain, i tend to need the arms of angels, throwing around curve balls like they’re trained to hit me with them (thought i’d make you happy Kimberly with a baseball analogy). it's Christmastime, and one of the first years i haven't made time to watch "It's a Wonderful Life." warning: its an oldie. black and white and sappy - one of my favorite stories about being woken up.
if something unexpectedly happens in my life, there’s an immediate moment where i begin to wake up. because i didn’t expect whatever happened to happen. whether i responded at any one of those times with a boo or a cheer (or much more dramatically so), it tends to be in those moments where my lungs work the hardest, my heart beats the loudest, my eyesight and hearing and sense of the world around me sharpens – and i am awake in that moment of life. sometimes i stay awake for a while….
the reality is, although i love to travel and i love to volunteer, changes in direction like this one in my life are led more by something urging me to stay awake, than they are by other motivations. the end of life will one day sneak up on me, and this is, it seems, one of those urgent calls to not miss a minute before then. other people get called to wake up in different ways - two of my best friends from graduate school, Jennifer and Jennifer, just had babies weeks ago - i haven't asked them about this particular point, but i'd guess that although they are both likely very VERY tired, they are both as awake as they have ever been. for me, it happens to be this RTW journey this time. God might choose something else next time.
journeys like this take people to places and moments of all kinds. some inviting responses of cheer, some of another sort. they see things that make their eyes blink, sleep in places that make their backs ache, eat food that makes their intestines bubble. and mostly because the sight or bed or food is new, the person can’t help but engage it fully awake, with their senses fully alert and emotional responses heightened. often times to survive in a place so new, they begin to learn to stay awake.
even so, there will be times this next year, where i may begin to fall asleep again, i'll get used to something and forget to live it, but i think, just as that begins to happen, that the plans we have made will go awry (you’ll know by the stories to come!), you'll hear the woosh of the curve ball in my writing, causing me to feel like i am losing my way….
