This year I’ve thought a lot about our life’s journey and the travels we make, literally and metaphorically.
I think it’s good from time to time to reflect on how far we’ve come. It constantly amazes me to realize how much more life, so far, has given me beyond what I ever dreamed.
At the same time, I am happy to look forward and make plans, and new Bucket Lists. To my surprise, I seem to have the energy and willingness to realize my dreams. What a revelation that has been! That first step really took me to places I couldn’t have imagined I was ever to see.
I have been writing more than I ever have this year. I have also fallen in love again…with Venice.
Coming back to Paris, a year earlier than expected, proved to me that you don’t realize what you are missing until you are without it for a while.
I also ended up travelling around the Mediterranean area twice, visiting some places for the first time and also revisited several again.
You see how heavy your Baggage is when you travel. You finally realize how much weight you are carrying. While I knew that some I had tried to put down almost 5 years ago was still chafing, I did not realize how overloaded I was by all of the old unresolved rubbish I kept moving around and repacking from as far back as my 20’s.
I learned also that we all need an outlet for our creativity. Where you find it may depend on what we can do well and have ability and talent for. It may also involve taking a risk and trying something new.
As we all know, Life – no one gets out alive. Meanwhile, whether we are participating in life or not, time flies. A look at the new Calendar as another year ends, sometimes shocks us into realizing how much time has passed. The singer Chantal Kreviazuk wrote a song – TIME – in 2003 which spoke eloquently to me about how time streaks by.
In my family, our two nieces are suddenly 16 and our nephews, well, several years older; a tangible reminder that time does fly…whether we are paying attention or not.
It’s wonderful to see that some of the work done before to simplify my life has paid off in making it less complicated and that I actually am freer than ever.
While it is true, like so many people who are survivors of very happy marriages, that most of us would give up almost anything for a moment more with our loved one; the present is a very good place to be living.
I think there is something in human nature that relates well to moving forward and experiencing new things whatever our ages.
When you move forward into the future after you have sorted through the things we all accumulate along the way, you give yourself some room for new ideas and new people in your life.
Meanwhile, what the past has taught us, allows us to move around easily using the skills we have mastered. Each new day opens up before us as one with possibilities for new experiences, making life a challenge and an adventure.
It was writer Henry Miller who said that ‘your destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things’. I know he was right.
As T.S. Eliot said in his poem, Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. (T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, 1943).
I believe that each of us can be happy, we just need to learn enough about ourselves to find out how.
Life is good; it is also what you make it. It is possibly the ultimate D.I.Y. project.
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