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Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms 2024

There is a strange finality to the world these days. Species going extinct. Democracy - never a perfect proposition - getting wobblier. Snow melting upon impact. Rain elusive, and then too heavy to hold. It is as if we all collectively forgot to do those things: to live, to share, to be with each other and the earth, and survive as we are.

Or maybe I am projecting.

My child is coming home from college for Thanksgiving for the last time this week. I just booked tickets for her last college show. It is the end of an era, and I feel sad.

I know that everything changes all the time, in big and small ways, and so the sadness is misplaced somehow, attaching itself only to those shifts I can actually see. I almost talk myself out of it. Almost. But I also know I will not be able to move on, unless I allow myself to mourn. This is the true benefit of being more than halfway through life: knowing that I must allow my feelings to exist, and moreover that they are a better weathervane for the seas ahead than my conscious thoughts ever were.

A friend of mine casually defined me the other day as “a person who clearly enjoys the journey more than the destination.” I felt sheepish and transparent, in that moment, but also impossibly seen.

I do enjoy the journey, so very much. I have a tendency to want to explore every little path that crosses mine, and I have gone down a fair number of them, enjoying pretty much all of those side-trips too. What is finality, but another path crossing where this one ends?

I love the journey. Even the parts where I mourn. We have things to do, to make sure there even is another path. No destination could have a better view than that.