This Time Around

Yesterday I spent some time contemplating what it would have been like to stay in Texas. Joshua and I both really miss my family a lot and eventually had to just stop talking about it yesterday in order to enjoy the trip. We are having a fantastic time now, but the feeling lingers that different paths are always available to us. We can make bad choices, good choices, great choices. And sometimes, it really is just a choice. What will you do with your life? Where will you go? What are your goals? Someone said something the night before we left that made me feel guilty about leaving and I had to wonder if the whole thing was a giant gesture of selfishness. Confessing this to my brother, I almost needed a release. He very calmly observed, “You’ve done this before. It’s where you’re supposed to go and you know that.” The heavy implication was the reality I have known in my heart since I was a child: I don’t belong in Texas. I just don’t. As big and wide as that sky is, it is somehow not big enough. And that’s okay. Choosing to move 1,800 miles away (and maybe eventually across an ocean) is not the choice to abandon relationships there. It is simply a selection of paths and this one carries me further away. It rips my heart out because I absolutely need those souls in my life and the more frequently, the better. But I also do not want to limit myself to a radius. The idea that the average person lives within a fifty mile radius where they are born is completely disconcerting and suffocating to me. Sometimes better opportunities lie outside of our radius but we feel safer within that space. (I acknowledge that sometimes the opportunities are not better or that the decision to stay is not always personal security, but those are two things that I am not willing to risk). So here I am. On this path. And today the music and lyrics of IO sang over me a proclamation…

This time around... You can be anyone...