I woke a bit early, showered, and made coffee. I caught up on Facebook, and disengaged as soon as I’d flipped through the posts of dear friends, because that’s all I was there to do. My weekend bag is packed for the weekend. I’m eager to the point of confusing excitement and anxiety, which also means – more, better, self-care, and closely managing behavior with an eye on the potential to reach that tipping point at which excitement might actually become anxiety, because that’s not a place I want to reach. 🙂

Every weekend that I go home – and it does, at this point, feel very much more like home there, than here – I promise myself I’ll write while I’m there. I don’t. It’s not a lack of inspiration, it’s more a lack of will to pull myself from those moments even long enough to write about them (or about anything else). It tends to point to the greater urgency to truly care for myself, and be present in my relationships, over sharing the tale of the moment with others. I’m sort of sorry for that – and sort of not. I don’t think I’ve spent any other portion of my life this emotionally well, and I feel generally pretty okay aside from the signs and symptoms of aging, and physical pain associated with such things (and other similar such things that have lasted far longer than any sense of age). It used to be that I could mock my physical pain because it was nothing compared to the chaos and damage, nothing compared to my emotional pain. Weird to actually notice how very different my experience is now.

Still, here it is Friday. Last week I drove down after work, after an appointment. This week… I’m so eager to get the weekend started I am seriously considering the drive down tonight, in spite of Friday evening commuter traffic being a definite thing for the first 18 miles or so, and likely taking about 90 minutes to get past that mess. I just want to go. I want to be there, more than I want to be here. The yearning makes my heart ache, and makes me breathless with excitement.

I’m so human, though. I remind myself that each journey in life, across distance, also represents – in living metaphors, if we’ll have them – our metaphysical journey through life’s experiences. My last trip down and back was ferociously hair-raising, and uncomfortably so. I’ve been working on the specifics of my emotional experience as a driver on American roads in my commuting. This is no different. I consider my intention. Get there safely. Get there without wrecking my emotional experience. Get there while also following traffic rules. Driving with the average speeding of traffic, neither slowing things down by being needlessly slow, nor screwing with the flow of things generally by aggressively insisting on going faster than the average speed of traffic. Considerate. Polite. Skillful. Safe. Purposeful. Alert. Aware. Unaggressive. Not taking things personally. Mindful we are each having our own experience. Arriving at my destination still happy I made the trip and feeling something other than profound relief to have arrived alive. 🙂 Gotta have goals. 😀 Committed to the journey, not the outcome. Not the time or the timing. Drive the drive, and enjoy that process first. Get there when I get there, and enjoy that then.

I’m so ready to begin again. Are you? Where will the journey take you?