I get misty
I traveled to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to do something I’ve been doing for almost two decades – go to a reporter’s conference. Some parts of it are old and tired (sitting in a hotel conference room with no view to the outside, eating bad food, not getting enough sleep, not even really getting to know the place you are visiting), some parts of it are familiar and new (meeting new people, deepening older relationships, and learning some new facets of my work).
It did remind me of the ever spiraling rungs of life that I’ve been writing about for – hey – nearly a decade. I took advantage of the hour and a half break not to walk through the beautiful campus but to lie on my bed instead and relax. There was a cold circling around the group, and I felt paranoid about getting it, so I opted for rest rather than to keep pushing on.
While I was staring at the ceiling it occurred to me that I’ve been on this continuous reinvention tour of myself and I don’t give myself time to appreciate it. A long-time colleague had said, “Rachel, every time I see you, you are living a new iteration of you.” I paused, because I always wonder if letting a little moss grow on me, might be a good thing. [read: no pun for the street I lived on called Moss Street.]
As a matter of fact, I was telling a friend about feng shui the other day and how you needed to have one good solid wall and your back to it and position yourself furthest away from the entrance. A friend was standing with me who knew me over the last decade; when I said, “The LaLa did not have one solid wall in it – it was all windows and doorways,” this friend turned and said, “That is a metaphor for that house – and why you had no power in it.”
While I was in Bethlehem, I learned about predictive analysis, the Bayes’ theorem, and that Nordstrom’s Employee Handbook has only three words in it – “Use Good Judgment” – all interesting and applicable. I thought about this on the plane ride home. At the end of the conference, a long-time colleague came up to me and said she has always admired me and thinks I’m more beautiful now than ever. She said this as she and I both welled up – “I don’t know why I’m getting all misty,” she said and I said I don’t know why I am either.
But I do know why because I’m a sentimental fool myself. She was looking at me and knowing just how profound my metamorphosis has been, and she was looking from eyes that had also journeyed thousand upon thousands of miles as well. We’ve been at any given time – different. And here we were standing together in a hermetically-sealed conference room in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania having journeyed separated and together through any one of those miles. Perhaps it does make you misty to think of it all – the whole enchilada – the fact that you can embody so much life experience inside one human being.
What’s interesting to me about people who are in my line of work is how eccentric they are – they all have very large outside lives from their workaday ones. They come from so many backgrounds, so many different places, and are all compelled into this work by the same trigger – intellectual curiosity.
At the end of the day, I came home, I unpacked, and I sat with all of this only to return to this present moment of awareness – all of it could vanish in a moment.