Stretch and Grow

September 27 2019

One goal for this year abroad was for us to spend quality time together as a family: we sure are doing that! Our little unit of four spends nearly all day every day together. From morning school to afternoon outings to dinner and game time in the evening, we’re together. This is a far cry from our busy schedules in the Chicago, where we leave in the am and see each other for a few exhausted hours in the evening, often bickering because by then everyone is exhausted.

The flip-side of togetherness all day every day is a weird isolation: a lonely longing for friends and co-workers and school teachers. These secondary figures in our lives, we all realized recently, play a valuable role in our identity, our self-worth. So, while we know that in a few short months the girls will be off to school in Australia and Pablo will be off to work and I will, well, I’m still figuring out the “I will” part, it’s the now of everyday where we need to live: and, perhaps for the first time in a long time, we’re living in the NOW. Learning to slow down our pace and to cast off strict time schedules will still adhering to a comforting structure takes time (and practice). I’m not sure how families who travel 24/7 for years maintain the living in the now, but I believe that having a job to solidify your place in the larger world, to create purpose and meaning in your day to day, helps. Without my position as teacher –one that I’ve held for over 15 years–I am working to stretch, to grow, to feel uncomfortable and to meditate on my purpose, my direction, and my goal in my days.

Recently, I woke on morning in our cozy two bedroom cottage in Weston Subedge’s Cotswolds disoriented, grumpy, and feeling very much alone. In the before, I likely would have pushed down these negative feelings, given my face and teeth a good brushing, gotten dressed and worked to shift –not process– my feelings. Who had time for that? Today, though, I stretched myself, leaned into Pablo’s shoulder and said, ” I feel float-y, lonely. What’s my purpose and goal in life? I don’t know anymore.” He hugged me and said he felt the same. We invited the girls into the conversation. We all stood in our country cottage kitchen by the sink and talked about our feelings. As it turns out, we were all feeling a little lonely and lost. After family hugs and sitting with the uncomfortableness of our feelings, we told a few jokes, started Mom and Dad school and then went about day.

Perhaps our new purpose is not to earn an “A” in school or to teach seniors the fine art of the argument or to tick any boxes in our day that would previously tell us we had a “good day” because we ticked our boxes. Perhaps our new purpose is to see and hear and feel–to experience–our world a little more closely. To stretch, to grow, to live.

I’m thinking once again, after so many years, of a quotation by Henry David Thoreau,

” I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.“

I think we too went out into the world–into this strange land of slow traveling–living outside of tourist model and resident –because we too wished to confront the facts of this world with all its messiness and see if we couldn’t pull out what it has to teach us.