3 Ginger Snaps

We’ve been home for just over one week. We’ve reconnected with family and friends. Sent a car to the wreckers. Gone grocery shopping. Walked by the kids’ new school. Almost caught up from jet lag. Started a new job. Started the kids in day camp. And started to build the new normal. It is summer time right now. The pace of life is generally accepted to be slower. It is and we can feel that. And still everything is swirling right now. 

As we settle back in to old habits and form new routines, we are just beginning to wrestle with the world of ideas that we were exposed to while traveling and figure out how to incorporate them into our life now as we start fresh. Take Buddhism for example. Last week, while sitting in a professional development session on the topic of mindfulness, I found myself pretty choked up when the presenter shared a passage that was very recognizable as a reframed and rewritten Buddhist text. Not that I’m an expert on Buddhist texts. I read a few while we were immersed in Buddhist cultures though and tried to absorb as much as I could – and there is lots about Buddhist texts that has permeated our culture – and so maybe I just got lucky and recognized this one. Regardless… it was the first moment since hitting the ground that I looked back on the experience and realized how incredibly rich it was and it gave me a brief look at how much the travels meant to me and how much they will mean for years to come and all at once the reality that our adventure was over hit me. Hard. Almost as though something was trying to knock me off my seat. Maybe it was. 

We just had an amazing weekend. Our friends the Tomini’s put us up in their basement, fed us very well, and allowed us to use their home as a base so that we could reconnect with life as we knew it before our travel adventure began. We got strawberries from Maple Grove farm. We visited the kids’ classes at Primrose school. We saw friends who, up until the point of our departure, had been a part of our every day. 

And we lived some of the most important routine things from our past – we cooked bannock over the fire!

When we picked up Charlotte and Ruby from their respective sleepovers, we had conversations with the host families about how incredibly well the kids had started up with one another after not having seen each other for six months. Same goes for the time we spent with Gulyas cousins at an impromptu dinner on the way home. It was reassuring to know that, while so much inside us has changed over the past 6 months of adventure, so much of what we count on has not.