This weekend was an interesting travel weekend as my dad returned to Massachusetts from his first full winter away in Florida and my husband left to go to Utah for his monthly visit with his sons. It got me to thinking…. where does your family really live?
I have fluidly changing views of traveI vacillating between love and dread. I love the adventure of making new memories which then lay the groundwork for years of “remember when…” stories. On the other hand, can become anxious thinking about leaving my dogs and the comfort of my routine. Both my dogs and I are at our best with the consistency of knowing what to expect.
I can get nervous about leaving home to meet up with friends I adore, miss, and always have fun with for a meal across town. Yet at the same time get excited at the thought and planning of traveling to another state to see a Bon Jovi concert. What can I say – the mind is a complex place.
When we’re young we think about what we want to be when we grow up and where we want to live. Remember those little folded paper contraptions that you’d put your fingers in and open in alternating directions in order to determine who you would marry, where you would live, and what kind of house you’d live in? For me, my favorite outcome was always Donny Osmond, at Hampton Beach, in a tree house.
As you get older you think about where you want to go to school, then where you want to settle down and work, and later on where you’d love to retire. It’s fun to weigh your options and think big because every possibility is open to you.
For me, “sky’s the limit” began changing between high school and college when the realities of what it meant to move somewhere else started to come into more detailed focus.
My idea of trying college in California morphed into first trying it out an hour away at the University of Massachusetts. It doesn’t help that your first year away you don’t have your own car there to escape if you feel the need to, and within the first week away I broke out into hives. By the second week my recent honor roll brain sat blankly in front of my first college math quiz unable to do even one question. I walked out in tears and just wanted to go home where everything felt safe again.
It didn’t make sense. I always loved traveling with my family growing up. I was shy, sure, but now that I was older, how was i ever going to marry Jon Bon Jovi, and live at Disney Land, in a castle, if I couldn’t even survive the college town just down the highway?
“What if” can be debilitating on both sides of the fence. Fearing the future, “what if” can cause you to worry about every worst case scenerio and come to the realization that it’s probably best to not change anything and just stay put without making waves. Analyzing the past, “what if” can cause you to second guess every decision, and indecision, until you’re sure you missed out on where you were “supposed to be”.
For me, the idea of moving away became a swirl of trying to reconcile being with the people you want to be with (in this case, my parents) while being in the places you want to be (somewhere it doesn’t stay so darn cold all winter). Unless you could all move as a cohesive unit, it seemed an unsolvable puzzle.
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Fast forward to present day.
My dad, who has worked hard his whole life to plan for the future, finally gets to reap the rewards of all his labors by semi-retiring and buying a winter home in Florida. No more shoveling snow, ice cold blistering winds, or being trapped inside for four months every year just to be warm.
My plan was to fly down to Florida and get to spend a little time celebrating his victory over winter with him. It would prove to me that it could be done – living in different places but not losing that bond of experiencing life together.
But then life kept getting in the way. “Once we get to the completion of project “X,” I will plan my trip”. But then project “Y” shows up and needs full attention. “Ok, once “Y” is done, then I can plan my trip down there”. But wouldn’t you know, un-wanted project “Z” shows it’s face and it wouldn’t be right to leave until that’s cleared up. Until before you know it, the winter is over, and my dad is just a week away from returning home to the Northeast.
We still talked on the phone, texted, and emailed. I even tried to Skype though I couldn’t successfully figure out how to make it work. I felt sad that I had failed him – in this first symbolic winter, I didn’t make it work the way I had imagined and hoped to.
In the voice of anxiety, that was the end of that chapter. But I tried to combat the voice by telling him all of it. The voice of anxiety speaks loudest when it’s the only voice, and sometimes just repeating what it’s saying to you, out loud to someone else, can help shrink it’s volume and power. There’s a difference between making excuses and sharing with someone the reasons why what you wanted to do didn’t live up to what you had the capacity to do. And someone who loves you will always know the difference and give you credit for honesty.
When I slowed my thoughts down to really think about it, we still shared with each other all of the significant life events that had transpired over the months we had lived in different states. There actually wasn’t any great, sad, frustrating, or funny thing that occurred that we didn’t get to tell each other about. We probably connected more across the north and south of the east coast than some fathers and daughters who live in the same city.
Turn focus to the travel schedule of my husband.
He doesn’t get caught up in inner voices like I do, but rather, sees each situation as merely a rubik’s cube of alternatives that just needs to be analyzed for a game plan, moving pieces this way and that way, until it’s solved. No looking back. No regrets. Only looking forward to the next puzzle that lays ahead.
His sons have lived across the country in Utah for a number of years, and each time he flies out west to see them, they all congregate in one place for the weekend and spend 48 hours just hanging out together. It’s a lot of video games, fast food burgers, and “Big Bang Theory”-esque science-y talk, but interestingly I think it ends up being more time spent together than for a lot of families who have kids living in the same city as a parent.
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Maybe having all the time in the world can make us too reliant on what we can do later. When there’s endless time, what’s the rush? But time has a way of flying by when you’re not looking. When faced with limited time, we’re more apt to reign in our focus on the person in front of us – whether that be in person, on the phone, or through written text or email.
Maybe it’s a lesson in it not being as important WHERE any set of people live, but rather HOW they spend their time when they do connect. And that the means of that connection, be it in person or remote, is less important than being present in the moments of that connection. After all, relationships live more in a feeling than on a map.
I know I haven’t solved the conundrum of living close to family versus letting life take you into new destinations in order to find where you are the happiest. And I know the ideas of leaving what’s familiar, traveling, and even trying out new places to call home will be topics of continued angst for many of us.
But as I shared, sometimes just lassoing those anxious inner voices and moving them out into the open can help quell them a little….. so take that voices of worry.