I sit in a cozy little home, warm and dry from the dreary and drizzle that is outside my window, and I'm thinking, I could have this in California!
I meet and stay with wonderful, interesting, and genuinely good people on on my travels, all the while I'm missing out on the really important people in my life back home. I know this is the inevitable risk one takes upon embarking on any kind of long-term (or sometimes short-term) adventure. Since I've been gone (this time) I've missed two best friends' birthdays, a wedding, an engagement, some very difficult crisis within the church family back home, and now, just yesterday, the passing of a very dear man who had been with my home church since it started 27 years ago.
In the end, I know I have chosen being on the road for myself. What is this drive to be constantly fleeing and constantly coming home soon? Part of it is fueled from the childhood rebellion of a adolescent sense of being a little too sheltered. Part of it is not really knowing what I want to settle down with, the very words frightening in a way because maybe I really don't know what I want in life. Part of it is running away, but only to want to want to come home again.
I don't feel like I will have this need forever (because it is a need), but all the while missing out on the lives of the people I plan to have in my life forever...do I regret that?
I have loved this journey of learning about the world through the people that are placed on my path, but dare I say I finally am coming to a point after nearly a decade of always leaving to wanting to come home, and stay home? Maybe not quite. I feel travel is just as much a psychological addiction as anything else, so once a travaholic, you are always looking for that next time to go somewhere, to see something new. But it doesn't mean I'm not also looking for that next time I'll be coming home as well. It's like I want both all the time, so it's nice to always look forward to something--and at both ends it's filled with cool people.
