Friday 4 May 2012

Looking for Courage

Have you ever looked around at your life and asked yourself, "Why am I still here?"  Most of us probably have at some point, usually in a figurative sense.  For me, it has become more literal.  For most of my adult life, my tenure in any one location or accommodations hasn't exceeded five years.  Now, I find myself having been in the same location for nearly seven years, trying to effect a figurative change of location (looking for work after having been a stay-at-home mom for the past decade or so), and realizing that the current physical location was a physical compromise and a spiritual cop-out. 

Courage has been hard to come by in the past decade, especially the kind that allows you to make small changes.  I don't do small changes well.  My soul craves drama, the grand gesture, the sense of packing one's bags and taking off.  The one recurring dream of my life involves waiting on the platform of a railway station, waiting for a train that will take me to the grand adventure of my life.  In the dream, I don't know where I will end up, only that I have a "ticket to ride" and the metaphysical horizon is full of anticipation and promise. 
Of course, much as I would love to pick up stakes and move on to the next adventure, reality and responsibility intervene.  Four kids still at home, a husband, and a mortgage hamper the spontaneous grand gesture.  But I see my kids growing without a sense of adventure, and that leaves me feeling with the sense that I have somehow failed them.  When they come running to me because of a thunderstorm and then stare at me with baffled incomprehension at my reaction ("Cool!  Let's go watch it!")  instead of grabbing pillows and settling in for Nature's light show, I know that I have somehow failed to communicate something imporatnt.  I remember being nineteen, working in a hotel in Waterton Lakes National Park, and sitting under cover on the fire escape stairs watching the lightning and rain, smelling the freshness of the wind, listening to the crack and rumble of the thunder echoing off the valley walls, and feeling my hair rise just a little as the lightning charges built. 

I'm not looking to travel around the world.  Career prospects and financial responsibilities make that a distant dream right now.  I just want to find somewhere fresh, hwere the outdoors is more tempting than TV or the Internet (although not so far out that there is no Internet service at all -- I'm not completely insane),  where I can get back in touch with Nature and share its bounty with my kids. 
Is that too much to ask?