Countdown New Zealand Day 9

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

Eight years ago, somewhere over Texas…..

New Zealand already seems like a lifetime ago even though it has been just 24 hours since we left the ground in Auckland. Here we are, still in transit.

After so much time invested in the last two months, it seems unfair that the memories, the feeling, of being there can pass so quickly. More lessons in impermanence, a reminder to take care of each moment because it is already in the process of dying. Travel only takes us away during the time it is occurring. As soon as we stop moving, the old, sedentary world comes rushing back into all the spaces that were so recently filled by the wind rushing past as we soared down mountain passes in the Southern Alps on our bikes or bloated by views of an endless blue sky set against the green of the sea and yellows and browns of the land.

Below us now, the Mississippi is meeting its end in a tangle of channels, lakes, and marshes splatter painted in a fan across southern Louisiana. Its waters are becoming a part of the Gulf of Mexico. Our path will likewise be splintered as the demands of jobs, others, and our own distractibility, plugged in once again, take us out in many directions at once. We must strive to find the channel, the depth in our lives that can guide us to what is true and of value.