We recently had 22 days of straight torrential rain here in Tampa. Our community faired it well with minor mishaps and some great photoshop humor on social networking sites.
I listed my camper just prior to the start of the flooding and was thinking how when I sell this rarely used vehicle, I would use part of the proceeds to pay for my sons' college and treat myself to an ultralight canoe to paddle around the island and navigate the streets when the water rises like this.
I grew up in Canada. Part of my summers was spent canoe tripping through Algonquin Park in Ontario. It is a beautiful, ancient-feeling part of the world, haunted by American-Indian lore. I returned a few years ago and it was as if time had stood still. When I was in my teens, we carried 70-pound pack on our backs and 75-pound wooden canoes over mile-long portages. I don't know how I got through it, but it stayed with me. Soloing a canoe through hail and lightning storms, being at one with the elements and beyond civilization is something that I came to embrace and find solace in. It is the blueprint for what brings me life and peace. The people I was with came from all parts of the world and that completed the universality of the experience.
I've been divorced now for 7 years. My boys have been my priority leading me to this next phase that starts this coming year. My course will be altered. I left my heart open to the possibility of love and a new family, but I new that would be difficult with the circumstances and that my focus had to remain on my children's needs, my needs would come later if necessary. Along the way I had opportunities for companionship, but it was a lonely journey for the most part. To maintain clarity and not get carried away with a temporary compromise based solely on emotion, as I had done in the past, I stood on one primary question directed to myself or any person I would consider another relationship with:
Where are you going?
There will be hailstorms and fog and log jams, but ultimately we all have a destination in mind. Short term and long term. If we don't, then we should probably figure it out or end up owning someone else's direction as our own.
I haven't run into anyone heading in the same direction yet, but if I had, the questions would evolve to where are "we" going? How can we help each other? What are we doing well? What do we need to improve?
After 7 years of little inspiration for a long-term relationship, it really excites me to think that on the journey next year in Spain, all the people along that path will be going to the same place, we will all be able to help each other, encourage each other, and I gather that even as we depart from one another, whatever the journeys beyond that, they will have a similar penchant.
It will be a canoe experience which will inevitably lead to another, and another...
