becoming a person who travels

I am off on an adventure.

This is the sort of thing I can imagine a person doing if they were in some sort of crisis, rearranging everything to leave the life they know behind for months at a time.

But I'm not. No crisis. I am seizing a moment.

I really wish I could play it cool, and be like "yeah, I'm off to Fiji. Just one of those things I do." But it has been an incredibly difficult adjustment getting to the point where I can see myself as a person who does something like this. I had to gradually practice saying "I am spending the summer in Fiji" to people. There were some awkward slip ups. I couldn't say it. I couldn't hear myself. I felt apologetic, afraid to tell people, ashamed of myself for getting a chance I wanted so badly. So many times, it has been me who has asked someone "do you have summer plans?" and gotten a reply that I envy painfully, because the ache to see the world never leaves my bones. My identity feels like it has always been the person who wishes she could travel, not the person who travels.

I have also always been the person who doesn't know what to do when she gets something she wants. Longing is more natural and familiar to me than acceptance and gratitude.

Years ago, I wrote lyrics to a song called Contentment, about learning to go on after your dreams come true, as if it's some sort of curse:

My world turned upside-down today forever
I have to learn to live without still longing for my dreams
and I want to just enjoy it
but I'm not sure how to sit here
not escaping from myself.
I'd like to bridge the gap between what I love
and what I've got.

When I wrote it, I expected that when dreams of mine come true (which has happened to me more times than is fair), suddenly I have arrived at a destination that I could expect to stay at. My dream is mine now; I get to keep it. 

Eventually, maybe only now as I write this, I realized that one is entitled to no such thing. If at all, our dreams only ever come true for a little while. Then we go on, we find new struggles, new challenges, new dreams to replace the old ones. So the key is not to clamber and claw at those dreams, trying to keep them from escaping our grasp, but to enjoy them while they last.

That will be my challenge on this trip. Before I have even left, I have already started worrying about what it will be like to come home, back to regular life. (Not that my regular life is at all bad. I have a comfortable and privileged regular life. I just struggle to find purpose and to feel motivated from day to day.)

I will be present and grateful. I will relearn to live.