The big picture

I'm no Liz Gilbert traveling the world eating, praying, and loving.
I'm no Cheryl Strayed hiking the arduous Pacific Coast Trail.
I'm no Isabella Bird.  No Isak Denison.  No Freya Stark.

But I do love to read about the travels of women--women who inspire me to take off from time to time and move about.  (When I return home, I shall have to remember to move about without the aid of wheels to rid myself of the fat I've accumulated by sitting in the car for hours--but it won't be at the gym where I foolishly injured myself, causing all this ruckus in the bands and tendons and fascia.)

I will walk.  I will do yoga.  I will drink more water, eat more vegetables and be an all-round better person, not to mention returning to my previously svelte state.

"Yeah, right!" some voice in my head says, accurately reminding me that "svelte" is a long-ago memory.

But  I do hope to at least trim off a few excess pounds, the gaining of which--remind me if I forget-- will have been worth it.

I would have loved to have had--at Liz Gilbert's age--a year to travel and write! (By that age, I was a mom which was better than Bali, but let's just say someone gave me a trip around the world for a year after they grew up....Let's just say.)

Or let's say I'd had the courage to hike the Pacific instead of driving it.  Let's don't even go there, actually.  Or ride a camel, or canoe down a dangerous river....

No two people take the same trip, even if they go together.  No two people seek the same landscapes at the same time, for the same duration.  One person gets antsy, the other says, "Let's go forward."

Even within one self, the assembled voices argue: one for safety maybe, the other adventure.  One for going forward, the other for going home.  One for being practical, the other for being excessive.

The task is, as I see it, to have conversations within and without while traveling. To converse among your many interior selves--that's the way you find out who you are at a particular moment.

To converse among friends and family members--that's the way you keep connected to the scattered tribe of people you love, each of whom shines a light on the questions you may be asking in a  take-what-you-like, leave-the-rest-behind sort of way.

If I'd had a father like the man in McDonalds who was so proud of beating his daughter to keep her in line, I might have lacked courage to step out of any boxes that were too tight.

If I'd had a mother who decided everything for me, I might have lost the "muscle" of making choices for myself.  But I have a clear memory of standing in my crib at ten months old (I know this because of where we were living at the time) with wet diapers, and Carlene (I didn't call her by her first name back then) asking me, "Would you rather get dressed first or have pancakes first?"  (I didn't know how to answer the question, didn't have the words yet, but the I knew that she was consulting me about my choices for that particular day!)

If I'd married a man who asked, "Who do you think you are?"--or who had negatively regarded every choice I ever made,  I might have lost all faith in my right to make choices.  (Here, I could go off-topic for a few pages, but I'll spare you....)

At a certain point, it's my choice to be who I am today. On the one hand, I have the go-for-it messages of my parents; on the other hand, I have the no-go messages from other sources--but it's time to silence the latter.  The ways in which other people silence us give shape to so many of the things we finally can no longer be silent about, right?  In some ways, what we do when we grow wonderfully old and free is to talk back to those tyrants of yore by doing what we want to do with courage, whatever it is.

At a certain point, it's my choice to silence the impertinent questions and opinions that already got too many years of attention.  That was then, this is now.  Maybe in some ways I'm like the child who has to "prove" to disapproving parents that she's going to turn out okay--except in this case, it's not my parents who doubted it.

At a certain point--is now.  Tomorrow is my 65th birthday.  Not only do I notice the ways age changes my body, but I also notice that it heightens my perspective.

As a young woman, I didn't see the big picture.  I saw pieces, up close.  I suspect that most young women are like that--though I can only speak for myself.  When I married at 18, I didn't have a big picture in mind; I had a honeymoon in mind, period.  Like a young driver who hasn't yet honed her peripheral vision, I could only see what was right in front of me.  (And I can hardly believe that those of us who drove each other around in cars as teenagers are still here to tell the tales.)

Even in my forties, when I drove from Texas to Breadloaf in Vermont, I used the AAA Trip Tiks page by page, never once studying the whole map.  I didn't know how the parts fit together, didn't even know the logic of road numbering.

What will I one day look back on about this year, this day, with similar insights, recognizing in some future day what I missed on this day?