Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

Duh. Cliché. Come on – really? Maybe I’m not smarter than a 5th grader.

My 5th grader knows that each of our journeys begins with the process of leaving home. Plans must be made, tickets or reservations made, last-minute items bought, outgrown clothes replaced, food snacks prepared. I print out his packing checklist, then we read it over and cross out any irrelevant items (winter gear for a summer trip to the Midwest) and add uniquely relevant things (dress-up clothes for an important event). He pulls his suitcase out into the middle of the living room a few days before departure. He begins to think of how to pack the most important Legos, Bucky Balls, and whatever current play things he can’t imagine being without. He counts out on his hands how many days’ worth of underwear, socks, shirts and pants he’ll need. What kind of jackets and hats. He adds his toiletry bag, still filled with all the flossers, vitamins and shampoo he failed to use on the last trip, so there’s nothing he needs to add. He packs with a flourish, finishes, then moves into the most difficult part of the trip – waiting to leave.

My son knows that when he is going somewhere, he first has to leave where he’s been. He may not know it like a parable, or an aphorism, but he knows it from the truth of prior experience. I wonder if he’ll generalize this to non-physical homes – the psychic home places in which we dwell for a while, before being challenged, coerced, or abandoned by others in order for us to imagine leaving. He has not yet had many opportunities to move from one world which he inhabits so fully to another, to be sent out from the Garden of Eden to find a new dwelling place. He hasn’t yet been challenged to leave the home of a cherished belief system.

In just a few short months, he will officially leave his elementary school, becoming overnight (the night of his 5th Grade Promotion ceremony), a 6th grader, a Middle-Schooler. He has few if any conscious memories of time before he has attended this school – he began right at age 5 – and in many ways it has been a home to him. He’s excited to start the new school, but just a touch sad and disbelieving. He will leave the physical and metaphoric world of elementary school embedded in his memories, friendships, sense of self, and, if we could find the right imaging tool, his neural pathways. He likely has a red-brick, two-story building and black-top playground landscaped into his mind, and flies above it as he does in the Minecraft worlds he has created.

He has yet to leave a friend, although some of his friends have moved away and left him. The crushing despair of leaving a love relationship awaits him, and I don’t envy the first time he begins to consider that the only way to journey further toward the life he needs requires that he leave the partner he is with. He has yet to leave his Mother, a journey he is on without even knowing he’s on it. He still thinks he can hold me the way he has held me – physically and emotionally – up until now. But the journey to his own loves and his own life will require that he leave this home. And when he returns, he’ll be a son-as-man, not son-as-boy, and that New World awaits our discovery and exploration.

I’m reading a book about spiritual growth. Every now and then I pick up a book about Buddhist philosophy (Buddhism for Americans, really, probably nothing close to Buddhist principles or practices such as they originated) or, I admit, an appeal-to-the-masses best-seller about simplicity, living with awareness, and “Eastern” philosophy that attempts to elevate the mundane to something important. Books about inner journeys, and how to make them.

It’s not until I see these books on my nightstand that it occurs to me I must be seeking something. Perusing the titles, reading front and back covers, searching online book reviews, even paying for them and bringing them home doesn’t send the message all the way through to me that I’ve begun some kind of journey. Sometime after I begin reading, however, it starts to dawn on me: I must be in that place.

I wasn’t the kind of 20-year-old who sought out spirituality; I was convinced I knew plenty, thank you very much, and that which I didn’t know I was happy to leave unquestioned. But I’m heading ever closer to 50, and, as my Mom said the other day, the older I get, the less I know. I’m less certain than I have ever been about so many things, and simultaneously convinced to my core that what I now know is likely to last the next 30 years. We’ll see.

I’m reading the book slowly. It took me several days to move past the first chapter, itself less than 10 pages long. The first chapter begins with the description of how all journeys, real and spiritual, begin with leaving – leaving home, leaving familiar ways of doing things, leaving customary beliefs, leaving what we think we know. This is so elemental, so fundamentally true, yet I read and re-read these pages, stunned by their profound message. I should know this. I do know this. I’ve taught it to my son, complete with a packing checklist. Reading it now, it’s as if I’m learning it for the first time.

I wrote an email to a friend, just like any newly-converted soul, professing my new awareness of the earth-shattering premise that in order to travel to a new intellectual/psychological/spiritual place, one must leave where they currently dwell. “My mind is playing hide and seek with the idea, and I keep returning to it, wondering at any moment if a thought I have is one I should leave behind, or one that leads me further. I’m not getting particularly anywhere with it, other than experiencing moments of some freedom to walk away from something I’m pretty convinced I know/think/feel, which is, I suppose, getting somewhere really cool.”

I imagine this means I am considering packing my metaphysical bag, seeing what I need to take with me to the next step, and what essentials of my everyday beliefs/existence won’t fit in to what I will carry on. I’m not sure, however, the final destination, although perhaps getting beyond Chapter 1 will be my first stop. Getting to 50 isn’t really a journey, because I don’t have to do or go anywhere for that to happen. But to become a better 50-year-old than I have been at any other age – now there’s a challenge. What to put on that packing list? How many pair of underwear will I need for that? Matching bras and panties? Lingerie or an ever-so-soft faded, torn t-shirt? My cell phone, lap top, MP4 player, date book? No matter what I will actually need, I will over-pack. I will have back-ups for changes in plans, weather, mood. Shoes are the hardest to pack light, at least for a girl. Sandals, walking shoes, running shoes, and a pretty pair of heels make perfect sense when I’m getting ready for one week visiting family. I might have to add hiking shoes or rain boots if it’s more of an adventure trip. My husband laughs as we pack up the car for road trips, and I tell him, only half-joking, that I’ve packed up the entire contents of our household to bring with us. He then carries load after load after load, coolers and groceries and coats and shoes and boots that can’t possibly be closed into a suitcase get laid on top, a mere inch or two of visibility out the rear window. I have not traveled lightly.

For this journey, perhaps all I need is a cup of tea, a comfy chair, and a book whose simplicity has electrified my mind. I could breathe occasionally. I could remember I don’t have to know everything. Or anything. That in order to get there, wherever there is, I can leave behind what I know. The new whatever-it-is-I’ll-learn is waiting for me. And if my son wants to do his nightly reading next to me, he’s more than welcome to squidgy in beside me. And if my husband wants to turn on his favorite baroque classical music, we’ll add that to the background. We’ll sit quietly in our independent yet intertwined activities for a short time. Then it will be time to think about what to make for dinner. I’ll close the book, head to the kitchen, and circle right back through the center of my family home I hope I’ll never leave. Right back into the mundane actions and chores and busy-ness that take up the next span of hours or days before I make it back to a book about spiritual growth.

I’m going somewhere, internally, for this next journey, even as my feet stay firmly planted at home.