I’ve been traveling quite a bit in the last month; not long trips, or far away but a few days here and then a few days there, just enough to feel unsettled if you are someone like me who prefers to feel settled. For over a decade I travelled for work, first to the same places regularly, and then to somewhere different almost every week. I was always just back from or getting ready to go somewhere, it was hard to just be where I was. Now I travel by choice and I am grateful to be able to see new places, experience the things I get to experience, and I am also aware when I travel of how much I like being at home, or being in my routine, or feeling safe. It’s all wound together in a way.

This week I drove a full day to get somewhere for two days and then drove back another full day. It is beautiful in California right now, everything is green and yellow and lavender-pink. I delivered the last of the things in the house that belong to my adult son, the children are gone, things have changed. While visiting him I commented on my recent running here and there and how I felt upended by not being in my normal routine. He wisely said that it was helpful to not have too fixed a routine so that you didn’t get stuck and fail to be able to have new experiences, learn new things. I thought about that as I drove home, having missed the time I spend in quiet every morning, not reading the meditations I usually start my day with, off the schedule for my plant care; all the little things that I do in the way I do them but that don’e really suffer if I don’t.

Going away from what you normally do, changing the way you normally do things allows you to filter through to what is most important about those things. To see in a new way what they do or don’t do for you, to wonder at why you do them, who you do them for. That is the value of a season like Lent, which we are in now, to change some of what I do and understand what is necessary, what is a habit, what is un-needed. It’s the value of a pilgrimage: setting out with the intention to allow yourself to be changed, to see the world differently. Doing or not doing the way we always do things shows us what is helpful and what is based in superstitious fear.

I think that what I have learned in this last month is that I want to do a lot less, I want to have practices that are portable, I want to take what I think I have to do at home and build that into my heart so that it is just who I am wherever I go. To pray without ceasing, to be present in the time and place I find myself, to share what I have, where I am not feeling like it has to look a certain way or be a certain thing to be worthy of sharing. It means we have less to hold us to one place, but more room to move.