For the last month, I've been on a sabbatical from work and have used the time to travel. We spent a week in Maine, skiing, about ten days in Tennessee and the Dominican Republic, and I managed a solo sojourn to Vermont for some skiing. My daily life is local: I can often manage a full week within a few hundred yards of my house; this series of journeys changes that pace!

Travel is motion and novelty. For someone who's never left the North American landmass, Hispaniola was quite the novelty. Perhaps this is yet another sign of  encroaching middle age, but I felt most of these journeys reminding me of previous ones.

My daughter and I skied for the first time at Saddleback, but my eye was drawn to the lake where I went as a kid and Sunday River, fifty miles distant, where I skied weekly throughout high school. I drove to Vermont for some solo skiing, and found my destination across the way from a mountain where I spent a two-day solo during my summer camp counselor days (20! years ago). Even our trip south reminded me of the past: we drive past the turn off for Purcellville, VA, where we went to college, and the road to Washington, DC, where we lived for five years. Even the international flight was a memory: the Atlanta airport marks the first time I met my wife, many work trips, and the place where we lived for a long year.

The memories of places we went to and left brought back related decisions about staying and going. Most of life's decisions, in your teens and twenties, are about pulling up stakes and moving on. It was novel, every few years, to be in a new mode and a new place. But the people we knew in college, DC, and Atlanta are now thinly tied to our present life. The more I think about it, the decision to stay put, to be stable, brings with it its own reward. You can really know a place, know your people, and be known by them. Stability is a virtue little recognized but all the more precious to achieve.

I'll end with one short quote from this week's lovely essay (linked below):

And so it is that my parents revealed to me another important element of stability: it’s never too late to start practicing it. 

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