but the things you do for love

Any psychic worth his or her salt would have predicted that my 27th and 28th years in existance would be full of travel and change. That I would pull up the roots I’d so lovingly spread in the fertile san francsico soil, shake myself off a little bit, and start to move. To have missed this fact would surely be as sign that this psychic’s skills were suited for little more than a carnival side-tent or $5 palm reading storefront on sunset boulevard. To have missed this fact would have been a gross oversight.

There are periods in our lives during which we are content. Comfortable. Maybe we have a solid job, a significant other with whom we can curl up at the end of a long day, a neighborhood that feels like our own. A video store that waves our late-fees, a weekend yoga class full of familiar faces and a corner market purveyor who greets us by name. Maybe we just relish in this space. We snuggle deeply into the soft sheets of this time in our life, smack our lips and smile.

Sometimes these comfortable surroundings provide us with an excellent external framework to support some journeys into our vast inner landscape. We reflect on the whys and the hows, poke at our ego minds a little bit to see what they’re made of and ask some of those big questions that make life interesting. We might collect some tools, strategies for tackling the less comfortable times in life. Sometimes this inner scavenging leads us into unfamiliar territory. Sometimes it pulls us out from under the covers into the bright bright light of day, plopping us down onto an entirely different peak on the big wave of life.

On this new crest, we travel. We build, we work, we run. We are bodies in motion. Things are less comfortable. Things are new. They are challenging. We rarely have the luxury of snuggle time. We do not journey often into that inner landscape because our travels are external and they are frequent. We need to rely on a solid inner world during these times, and have neither the time nor the energy to shine flashlights into darkened corners. We keep our bags packed and are always 3 phonecalls an e-mail and a timezone behind. We are not “on top of it all”. Our schedules are not consistant. During these times, we try to employ some of those tools we added to the box before we knew exactly what they’d be good for. Of course, we lost the instructions somewhere between Bangalore, New York, SF and LA. We take deep breaths. We feel undeniably alive and passionately engaged and every so slightly stretched to the limit. In the quiet moments, we long a bit for that comfortable valley, before we are off and running again.

And so it goes, in my life at least. The peaks and the valleys. Stillness and movement. Journeys in and journeys out. The Yin and the Yang. From the valley, I could no more have imagined or yearned for this peak than I can now envision my next resting place. But I of curious mind and open heart trust that there are many more peaks and valleys down the road. For now, these feet seem made for walking.