I am feeling the urge to create.
I am thinking of the life all around me.
I rise and I rush for a pen, fearful that I might lose the words bubbling in my brain. Writing them down is such an important task for me. It seems like I haven’t had this urgency for a long long time. Heaven knows I have tried but it always seemed to escape me.
Yet here they are.
And I am watching. It used to be that I was “doing” and now I am “watching.” Watching as the children that I bore repeat all of the experiences that I once did. Remembering what it was like when life seemed so full of all of the adventures that I yearned for – remembering what it was like to go to a new place to live, set up house in a different state, look for a new job doing whatever I loved to do.
Listening to people that had been brought up differently than me, that had a way of looking at life that I had never heard of before. Looking for a new library, getting signed up for my new card, and seeing a whole new room of books unknown to me before. Making new friends, finding a friendly neighbor, finding the best bank, best grocery store.
This has been the pattern of my life. Always the urge to see down the road, over the next hill, wondering what life had to offer if I went looking.
And so I did go looking. Lived in so many different places that I have to stretch a long ways back to remember them all.
Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana…the farther I went west the more I loved it. Freedom from the restrictions that bind us all in our state of birth, of growing up around relatives who expected us to live as our families had always lived.
Maybe the restrictions were only in my mind. I don’t know. But the air was bigger and broader and more open wherever I went, and so I traveled and moved, and saw the world in a new and vital way. Each new move was to a new culture and a new life style, and I thrived on it.
And now I am returned to the land of my birth, and I still travel and I still think of all of the places I have been, but somehow I have come full circle. My children have scattered to their own destinies. They have traveled and made their own homes in many different places also. Did I instill this wanderlust in them”? Or is it just the way that Americans are, always looking over the next hill, wanting to be their own person, looking for the end of the rainbow? We seem to be a restless people, not content to rest on our laurels, no matter what our ages.
Looking back, this is where I am right now,and also looking forward to where I’ll be tomorrow. I must never lose the sense of adventure or life will become complacent and dull. There is always another place over the next hill that awaits us all, another group of people to meet who have a new way of looking at things.
We cannot afford to relinquish the past or the future for that is where our understanding lies. We must keep our zest for living to use as a warm and comforting blanket, allowing us to enjoy our days.