Thoughts on significance, expectations, adventure and roots.

I wrote this a few years ago, however, it feels as potent now as it did then. Like a long-fought battle or an epic journey, endless and arduous. Until the day comes that it does end, and perhaps I’ll look back and realise, the most difficult of journeys are where the jewels are. 

Our story is not really remarkable, as it sits between pages, and feeds, filled with other souls who like us woke up from the domino effect that is a life of ‘should dos’ and unquestioned expectations.

Like them, we ached for something more, for something simpler and with more destinations.

So I won’t tell you that story. You’ve already read it, you already know it, maybe you’ve already lived it.

I’ll tell you what happened after, after the possessions where sold, the van was packed, the doors were closed.

When the van rolled away into the world filled with dreams and hopes and tinned food. Not knowing what we’d find out there, my god I hoped it would be good.

But it wasn’t what we found out there, it was what we found within. The fear, the uncertainty the perceived judgement from our kin.

We found emptiness and freedom, wildness and a vast kingdom of solitude that when we resurfaced in society made us feel vulnerable and out of place.

We blindly stumbled through the unmarked track that is working from the road. Not yet sustainable, never certain and sometimes heartbreaking.

We found we couldn’t escape the want for confirmation, that our existence was worth something we yearned for that affirmation in empty likes and strangers recognition.

We had left the traffic jam but now we were lost in the woods, the environment as ever-changing as our moods.

I turned to Adam on those first few days and predicted, that these roads would take us to the highest passes and the lowest valleys and now I know I was right although our Instagram may have often contradicted.

The need for significance has not left, she sits in the back seat crying out for attention, asking ‘are we there yet’ I think we are all coming to realise that we may never arrive which only added to her apprehension.

What I have come to describe as adventure ache turns out to be a chronic condition, but it can be managed, its symptoms eased with a lot of listening and prevented with a life lived fully. Adventure is not just found in the wilds, it can be in our most mundane of days if we look for it.

But how do we try to explain, to convince anyone else of our purpose in life if we can’t even convince ourselves? The answer is we can’t. We must do the work, take out all the boxes of history and beliefs that we have carried with us and unpack them, keeping only what still serves us and rip out the pages that don’t, bind up what’s left and arrange them neatly like paperbacks on a bookshelf.

I set out to be more like a Jackpine, that grows anyway that suits itself. But what I’ve come to realise is that even a Jackpine needs roots and I have denied that of myself.

But what are roots? Can they be cultivated in an ever-changing environment? Do my roots have to look like yours? Are they possessions? A house? A community? Are they static? Or are they, in fact, a feeling, a routine that grounds you, a morning ritual that makes you feel at home wherever you are?

I like the sound of those roots. Flexible and strong, you can re-pot those roots over and over and they will not shrivel and die. Once grounded they are connected with the community of the world, because wherever we are on this planet, so is everyone else.

We can choose to feel that connection, I think it’s called oneness, the feeling that we are nature and nature is us, no cell different, no cell the same. I’m not there yet, but I get glimmers of oneness, in quiet places and vast spaces.

It’s all getting a little deep now, a bit intense, the moment when the anxious laughter starts and the ‘wow there’ … but stop for a moment. Let the discomfort sit with you. Maybe it’s a call to go deeper. We have lost a sense, our society has lost the sense of spirit and without it, we all suffer.

Our story is not remarkable and neither are we. But this life is remarkable and nature is remarkable and this world is remarkable and we are all a part of those things. So that has got to count for something, maybe something remarkable.