On Leaving Home
“There are plenty of reasons not to toss your life up in the air and see how it lands. Just don’t let fear be one of them.”
Today I leave home, for adventures both long-planned and as-yet-unimagined. Today I actualize a 30+ year-old dream: to go meet the world again, as I did at 22, when I chose the path less-traveled and boarded a plane bound for Guatemala with only a one-way ticket in hand.
The sacrifices required to give my dreams wing are enormous. I have relinquished my home in all the ways: leaving the physical home that I built with my own hands and effort, and the home of my heart (which is to say: my marriage). I am aware of the great gift and privilege that is mine, in having a chance to chase a dream. So few people, and even fewer women, ever will. But still: the jumping off is daunting.
Below is a photo of the pack in which I carry my belongings. I bought it a decade ago, along with another for my then-10-year-old son, on a wild whim. He longed to climb a mountain – to summit a glaciated peak, specifically – to meet the requirements to join a local mountaineering club.
It was a Friday. I’d just been diagnosed with yet another type of skin cancer and had gotten a call that pathology proved the initial surgery insufficient, so the surgical schedule had been cleared to get me back in first thing Monday morning. Feeling well enough, but not knowing when, or if, I would again, I decided to climb a mountain with my child over the weekend, while I believed I could. It was foolhardy and impossible; perhaps irresponsible. We had undertaken no training, no preparation. Physically, I was nowhere near the top of my game. Yet eleven hours later, we stood together on a glacier on the edge of the crater of Mt. St. Helens.
I am as scared today as I was standing at the base of that mountain, looking up, letting my child carry the bulk of our supplies because I couldn’t manage much with my bandaged body. But I climbed anyway. As so many others have done before me. As I am so lucky to have a chance to do again.
Here’s to giving hope a chance. Here’s to betting on it with everything we’ve got. May it always burn brighter within us than our fears.
May it light the way.
Note: I wrote this on my phone, in the Portland, Oregon, airport, in the early hours of morning, waiting to board a plane and fly away indefinitely. I posted it on Instagram as they closed the plane doors. My apologies to those of you stuck reading it twice; I won’t double up in the future. Instagram will be for pics; this, for musings. But that morning, I just needed to write … and I needed to figure out how to use Instagram right quick … so these thoughts landed there. If you want to subject yourself to me in all the places, you’ll find me as ellen.urbani on Instagram and Facebook.