3 Ginger Snaps

A week ago today I stood here, on the second floor patio of the MaRS building in the heart of Toronto and looked longingly at the intersection of College and University as the double decker tour buses rolled by. 

Just two weeks before that moment, I was on the other side of the pre-recorded audio tour with the disposable foam tipped headsets taking in the sights of London. Now I was back at work and my mind was doing its best to try and keep up with the pace of the professional world. I was at MaRS for a teacher professional development workshop. I was preparing myself to be back in the classroom after 2 years of being a stay-at-home-dad, 3.5 years of running down a dream in the woods, and 6 glorious months of wandering the earth. And the preparations were going… ok. Truth be told, I can’t claim that I was thrilled about being back at work. Work is usually fun for me and I apply myself whole heartedly to my responsibilities. But as my I remember my dad telling me one rainy summer afternoon sitting in an aluminium boat in a bay of Kahshe Lake, the worst day of fishing is still better than the best day of work. Amongst a talented and motivated group of professionals I was feeling old and out of date as I did my best to make sense of stuff like this:

 I was missing the adventure of travel. 

And I was away from these people:

The distance from downtown to home was only 60km and yet MaRS may as well have been on a different planet that day. 

Although we didn’t know it at the outset, the gift of travel together as a family that we gave ourselves turned out to be a present that bent the time-space continuum in favour of us. It put us first every day. It focused us on us. And it stopped that feeling that our family life was being shot out the end of a garden hose with someone’s massive entropy inducing thumb over the opening, spraying us outward, away from each other, in tiny fractured droplets of ourselves when we were really supposed to be moving through space and time together in one continuous stream. Traveling together made this

Normal. 

When I was 24, I spent 56 days crossing a section of the Canadian arctic on a canoe trip with 5 other people. It was the best wilderness experience I had ever, and probably will ever, have. And, at the time, I had no idea it was happening. I had no idea how deeply fortunate and privileged I was to be there with the time and space to be fully immersed in the simple, fulfilling and healing act of being there with the people I was there with. And while I didn’t squander the opportunity completely, hindsight tells me that I didn’t make the most of it either. 

Fast forward 16 years and now I’m here

And a whole lot of other places too and I know we didn’t squander any of it. That said, you can only bend time and space for so long until the gravity of your situation pulls you back in orbit. 

And that is where we are right now. We are settling into orbit. Mapping out a new set of rhythms that will once again make our travel through time and space predictable and stable and the thing that is just coming into focus for me, as I am about to complete my 40th trip around the sun, is that we get to choose the source of gravity at the center of our situation. Of course, this is a message that I’ve been hearing since my elementary school phys ed teacher, Don Graham, aka “The Gray Coach”, started telling us in Grade 6 or so: we were responsible for our own choices. And I never even came close to understanding the magnitude of what he was talking about until right about now. Now that I have a sense of the fully vested and simultaneously unattainable value of what is behind me and, if I am able to stay on this path that I am so unbelievably fortunate to be on, the incredible riches that are yet to come.