Thoughts about travel, writing, and finding your purpose.
As my last post promised, the past two weeks have been quite an adventure. My brother and collaborator, Jeff, and I embarked on a two-week tour of the country that included stops at something close to a million different places where our parents made their lives. Both of our parents are now passed, and they each donated their bodies to scientific research. What remained was cremated, so we targeted certain stops to scatter some of their ashes.
The jaunt started with a flight to Virginia, where Jeff was born, and passed through Fostoria, Ohio, on the way to Leesburg, Indiana—both places our grandparents lived. After touring and fishing occurred, we made it to South Bend, Indiana (where Mom and Dad met, and where we all lived for a bit) and then to Chicago (where Mom and Dad honeymooned). Jeff and I did our magic for the Cubs, watching them lose a game with a friend, then headed through Casey, Illinois (Big Things, Small Town), which is the birthplace of our paternal grandfather and his brother (the namesakes of our Cruise Brothers protagonists!). Then came a couple of days in Louisville, Kentucky, where my dad was a longtime professor and where Jeff and I went through most of our school days.
A flight later, we were in Tucson, Arizona, where Mom and Dad spent their last years, and then Phoenix, where I was born.
The whole thing took twelve days.
So, yeah, I’m tired, but as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s a good tired.
In a way, this trip felt a lot like writing a novel. We plotted the whole thing out, of course, roughly anyway. We had a decent idea of what we were doing, and the first couple of days were bright and exciting as we forged our way ahead. Of course, things don’t go exactly according to plan. There are the swimsuits that got left behind, anyway.
Hehe…if you know us, you know it happens.
Like writing a book, though, the sheer size of the thing means everything eventually stabilizes. The middle comes along, where you’re still happy to be doing everything, and where surprises come and make you happy, but where it also begins to feel like you’re on a bit of a treadmill. Time to make the words, right? Finish chapter six, and it’s time to write chapter seven. By the midpoint, everything feels kind of uncertain. Or if not uncertain, it’s more like the machine has to run, you know? We’ve got to move. Places to be. Miles to drive. We need our 2,500 words a day, right? Keep going and you’ll get to the end.
Not that it was work.
We found a few spots we weren’t certain we’d be able to find, and that was cool. And every step was most definitely fun in the process—or, if not fun, certainly fulfilling—just like writing a book. Because writing a novel, even in those weird moments when you’re not sure what you’re doing, isn’t really “work” so much as it is a test in perseverance. It’s going to end. And you’re going to love it. But you need to do the things. And, really, the journey is the beauty of it all…and in the case of this trip, that was so true. Two weeks with Jeff was a great experience. Extracting ourselves from the demands of everyday life. Finding our way. Seeing places we grew up. It’s the first time we’ve spent that kind of time together since we were kids, and that was a blast. Seeing a bunch of friends again, and meeting the people who now live in the houses we used to live in, was really, really fun and also surprising in the way that writing a chapter can be fun as you run into things you hadn’t expected.
That doesn’t even count the fishing trip and the splash in the Atlantic Ocean—which I’ll equate to those times when you get to a scene you’ve been anticipating, and you find that the writing is even better than you thought it was going to be.
The end of the trip was like finishing a novel, too.
Technically, the story was over when we finished in Phoenix. We had finished the quest. Dropped the ring into Mt. Doom. But there was still a validation to achieve, which is where the drive back to Vegas sat. It was a quiet drive. About five hours. As miles passed, we shared thoughts about each of the stops. A few words here. A few there. These thoughts cemented the truth of the trip (for me, anyway). Thinking about them brought out their meanings. Life is a weird thing, I think. It’s a beautiful thing. We are all here for only a relatively short time.
What we think of that time is mostly up to us, I suppose. And our situations.
During a session with a group of friends, the idea of having a purpose in life came up several times, which I now think was totally appropriate. We are all getting older. It’s natural that we start asking ourselves about what it means to have a purpose in life. I suppose it would have been great if we had come up with a nice set of pat answers to those questions, but alas, life doesn’t work that way. We don’t get to know those kinds of things.
All we get to do is to live the life we live, and let the dice fall where they may.
The trip home was a good coda, though. A validation of our jaunt in the same way that the whole jaunt itself was a validation of the story of two lives lived in such a way that we could take this trip to begin with. The trip, and the final leg of the trip, was steeped in both the past and the present. Which, again, I think is appropriate.
Just as in a novel, an ending is not really the end.
Despite the pages being closed, the main characters will move on into tomorrow. At least some of them, anyway.
The future is uncertain, though.
It’s only the past that can be understood—and probably more important, it’s only the present that can be used to make those understandings and then to make the changes you want to make.
Maybe that’s the key to finding a purpose?
I don’t know. I might figure one way, and you might figure the other.
That’s the thing about writing a book, too, isn’t it? You write and you write and you write again, trying to make your work everything you want it to be. And in the end, after the book is finished and it wings its way through the whole of space and time, it’s everyone else who gets to decide what it means.
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Whew…that got a little heavier than I expected.
Given the basic topic, that’s not too surprising. But I was—admittedly—still surprised. Another thing about writing into the dark, right?
It really was a great trip.
But I’m glad I’m back. Mentally refreshed, though still in physical recovery after spending twelve days in planes and car seats. It’s good to be here, and good to be ready to make words again. Good to have Things To Do, Milestones To Achieve. Books to Publish.
# # #
Sounds a lot like the beginning of a long trip, doesn’t it?
Grin.
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