JOURNEY

JOURNEY

It can be a name. Journey – it is the act of traveling from one place to another. Journey – the passage of one phase of life to another. JOURNEY is one of my favorite words… describes my life, filled with experiences that have shaped and are shaping me and my life’s purpose. My family and I just started a journey like no other to be shared with you over the next few months.

My journey with Journey (name) began before I knew her parents and before they knew her. We met because a mutual family by choice deemed it their responsibility to introduce us. Her parents took care of us with a small but huge necessity in our life – coffee. We took care of them with a small but necessary commodity at the time – face masks. It would be a year after these exchanges before we physically met.

I was on the periphery of Journey’s journey before her conception. I witnessed her parents’ marriage vows, celebrated with her parents when they announced her in-utero existence to the family amid Covid – met her ex-utero at three months old – held her just before she turned one and not walking – and recently witnessed her in her space in New York, walking and touching everything AND just before my taking a ten-thousand-mile journey. I have shared a small piece of Journey’s journey from total dependency on others to the advanced age of toddler and she mine from one year to another.

Journey’s life journey is in its infancy. My journey is marching toward completion. We are on this planet at the same time, geographically miles apart and yet our individual existences have managed to touch, and we share a mutual journey.

A love affair, marriage, and a desire to start a family were the beginning of Journey’s adventure. My ten-thousand-mile journey began with a desire to experience another part of the world, its culture, its similarities, and differences to mine.

Without action, a desire or dream can be a series of sentences building a paragraph and paragraphs that eventually form a fairy tale. Journey’s journey would still be locked in the recesses of her parents’ brain had they not had a plan and acted. My dream to experience Balinese and Thai culture would still be a wish had not my co-traveler for life and life experiences not acted.

Journey’s journey was and is completely orchestrated by her parents but even at this early juncture, she throws the unexpected wrench into their well-planned strategies and executions. This is no different than the unscheduled and unplanned events in my life. And like Journey’s parents, I don’t throw a tantrum and walk away, I adjust. But without a plan and action, neither of us would be.

PONDER THIS THOUGHT…The one who refuses to relocate creates the journey that ends before it ever starts.