Rona Musings Gratitude Day Six

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”

― Lao Tzu

Today I am grateful for travel.

I have always had a thirst for wanderlust.

“Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”

― Erol Ozan

My favorite way to travel for pleasure is with no set itinerary. To wander. Stop when the muse strikes or I see something interesting. At the halfway point, turn around and go home a different way.

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

― anaïs nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

My love was just the opposite, go figure.

His life was structured. Based on detailed itineraries. Drilled down to timed bathroom breaks. But travel, he loved to travel.

My friends had a game called “The Larry Vacation Game” AKA Let’s see if Larry had been or heard of our destination. They took bets and everything! Of course, he had been nearly everywhere. If they told him after the fact, he always pointed out sights that they should have seen.

My Love loved traveling so much that one of his favorite books was “The Time Traveler’s Wife”. He always said that if he died before me, he would be sure to come back and find me.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

― Marcel Proust

Since my Love exited this plane of existence and is seeing the world with new eyes, I am sure that he is traveling to all the places he wanted to see but couldn’t…

“I tramp a perpetual journey.”

― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

I am waiting for Rona to end so I can indulge my wanderlust and resume traveling for work and pleasure. Because to me, travel is alluring. Always a learning experience, a way to meet new people, see new things, and explore.

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..”

― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

The road leading from grief to mourning to healing is travel of a different sort:

Unknown territory at first…

It starts out in darkness with no moon to guide the way

Then comes occasional cloudy days,

Followed by dawn with periods of sunshine and hope

Periodically stormy days – some that feel like hurricanes or tsunamis.

The sun inevitably sets and back to darkness

But always, always, always, dawn heralds a new road to travel on the path to healing — a new lesson to learn while reinventing oneself again.

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

XO Lisa