The Return

is the part that might kill me

I’ve just landed. When you read this it will only be a few days since my return. What follows is written from within a fog of jet lag and hope.

“You didn’t get an email?” she asked, “Your first flight has been cancelled, so you’re not going to make your connecting flights, but let’s see what we can do.” It turns out, what she could do was get me to my final destination an hour earlier than originally planned by way of three flights on three different airlines. It was a miraculously smooth transition.

A woman I met on the road told me that going back would be the worst part and that according to her experience, back when she was 18, of leaving and returning home, is that I could expect to fall into a deep depression and not get out of bed for at least a week because it will be so upsetting to me to realize that I had changed, but nothing else around me will have changed.

Dr. Martin Shaw talks about how it used to be the wilderness that was the most dangerous part of a journey. Here he’s using the word wilderness to refer to the part between the leaving and the returning - the unknown road, the deep woods, the desert valley. The wilderness itself could kill you with its harsh elements, and if that didn’t do it, there are plenty of other kinds of predators happy to assist in your annihilation. But modern life, with all its convenience and comfort, screens and social media, and worship of the superficial is now much more dangerous. Nowadays, the return is more likely to kill you, and anything newly grown within you.

When you’re used to a lot of NO from Life, receiving a YES can feel really tricky. It can be difficult to trust that the thing you really want but feels impossible is possible and well within your reach, especially when you can’t see the path forward or figure out how it will become possible at all.

It’s not true that nothing here has changed. It’s not true that I’m sobbing under a duvet of depression. It is true that I am at one of the biggest crossroads of my life and I’m making decisions about which way to go every time I’m gripped with fear about anything possible. It would be so easy to slip back into the old mindsets and patterns of living I’ve worked so hard over the winter to sever. I’ve never had less than I have right now in terms of resource and solvency, I’ve also never had as large an opportunity in front of me to truly change the course and landscape of my trajectory.

I’ve returned to a familiar place externally, except now it includes crossroads and forks that weren’t here before. I could choose to return to a familiar place internally - that part of me that says no to the grand adventures Life provides because they lack practicality or a road map or visible resources. Or, I could choose to keep moving towards open doors, trusting more deeply that what I need will show up when I need it. In the past this has been an excruciating lesson - the kind that makes me want to stay in bed and sob. I have been known to try and wrestle the known from the grips of the unknown, and I’ve never once been successful.

Everything is both more and less familiar than ever. Everything is both more and less clear than ever. How deep will I allow this experience to go? Is it over or has it just begun?