You know that feeling you have when you’ve had a great vacation? That pleasant, relaxed inner calm you get when you’ve gotten some clarity on your life’s big picture goals? You see how far you’ve come thus far (in your marriage, your career, your personal growth) and then you take those benchmarks with you back into your everyday life.
I want you to imagine yourself paddling a canoe on a river, responding to every change in current as it comes, trying to remain focused on your destination but also reacting to each small crisis as it arises. Your day is filled to the max, stressful and eventful.
Now imagine you are in an airplane watching yourself from above as you paddle that canoe. You can see that each ripple is part of a larger pattern of movement, a natural flow. That emergency turn was merely a bend in the river.
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My husband, who I’ve decided to call “Mr. B” on the blog from now on, and I were trying to fill a very real need to reconnect with each other after months of parallel living. He travels almost every week in his work. Add in our parental duties and we don’t see each other nearly enough, let alone check in with each other on matters of substance. We needed a vacation.
And then an opportunity came up. School was out for the summer. Childcare was available (thanks mom and dad!). And so I joined Mr. B for part of a work trip to New Orleans and then we stayed the weekend.
When we left home, we were very much like that canoe on the river, except we were actually in two separate canoes trying to keep together in a rushing current. We went to New Orleans on two separate planes two days apart from each other. At first, Mr. B was still working and it seemed we were having independent vacations.
Of course we had an excellent time together, as we always do when we take ourselves away. We really talked and really listened to each other. Throw in a bit of jazz, some excellent cuisine, and some site seeing and you could say it was the best few days of our year.
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As we were heading back to Houston, I likened our airplane’s ascent to the changes we brought about in our relationship in the few days we were away from home. These are stages that almost every relationship needs and undergoes. Perhaps you’ve traveled through them yourself.
First you are at the river’s level in that canoe. Then for a little while you are in a cloud with no direction, lost, while you do the hard work, but gradually you rise to see that the shadows cast over you were merely clouds.
Then you get a break in the clouds to see they are much smaller than you previously thought and the river itself seems manageable if you could implement a few key tools for the journey.
A little more height and you are soaring above it all, seeing the pleasure in the journey and where you’ve been and where you are going and the sunburst that was hiding in plain sight, just beyond the clouds, all along.
This family lost a one-day-old baby and two other children to Yellow Fever.
The exterior walls tell their own stories.
