Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart… The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on you.
Anthony Bourdain
I’ve discovered that one of the most important reasons to travel is that not only does it provide the opportunity to learn and experience the beauty, mystery, and wonder of new places, but travel teaches me things about myself. It also gives me a fresh perspective on my own corner of the planet that I am not privy to otherwise.
Sometimes we have to leave where we’ve been in order to see where we were.
As I wrote two days ago, we are living in a unique time in history. None of us have lived through a worldwide pandemic like this ever before.
We all are travelers now.
We are all travelers in a new and unfamiliar land. We didn’t choose it, but here we are. And as all good travelers know, there is much to see, learn and experience about ourselves and the world around us in this new land. We have been given the opportunity to change, to grow, to expand.
One of the best ways to process and learn from an actual journey or a metaphorical journey is through writing. Henri Nouwen said,
Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write.
To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: ‘I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write’.
Our second son is serving a year in Uganda as a nurse. He shared with us that he is writing down his experiences, the new questions he is asking, and the things he is learning about himself and the world around him. It’s all fresh for him in this moment. And because he doesn’t want to lose any of these insights, he’s writing it all down as he goes. He knows that once he gets back to the US, those perspectives may slip away, except that now he has them recorded.
Even if you’ve never been someone who journals or writes down your thoughts, questions, and learnings, I would like to suggest that now is a fantastic time to start.
Writing is a powerful way to give witness to what is alive inside of you. And most of us have more time now.
Here are some questions I am asking (and can be adapted to kids as well)
- What changed today? Or, What did I experience today that was new or different?
- What is something good that is coming from this day?
- What is hard or challenging?
- How am I feeling about what is happening today?
- What am I learning about myself, those around me and/ or the world?
- How can I call upon my faith during this time? (This is where I write down my prayers, meaningful scriptures, or what I sense Spirit saying).
Or maybe you don’t need questions to prompt you, and you prefer an open-ended, stream of consciousness style of writing. Whatever works for you.
The how and the what is less important than the why -and that is this:
You are now seeing and experiencing things you’ve never experienced before. Capture it. The act of writing will expand you. You won’t regret it. It will help you to process the here and now and give witness to what’s in you.
And someday you will be glad to look back on your writings as a way of remembering this unique time in history as you alone experienced it.
No one else is experiencing it as you are. That right there is gold.
Photo by Tom Rogerson on Unsplash