I've been thinking about aging a lot lately. Maybe it's the weather or maybe it's what I see when I look in the mirror or maybe it's how I feel when I get up in the morning or maybe it's how I can't remember what the hell I did yesterday. But mostly, I think it's how I seem to have lost my sense of adventure. Perhaps I've only misplaced it, but for the life of me, I can't find it.
I've always understood that age is just a number. This fact has been illustrated to me by knowing people who are old at thirty and others who are still young and eager for whatever adventures life has to offer at eighty. My own mother just got back from Egypt and she had a great time. And yes, she's eighty years old.
Me? I'm about to go all the way to Chattanooga, Tennessee for four days and I'm stressed as hell, worrying about what to pack and how much my diet will go to shit in four days, eating in restaurants.
Who's the old person here?
I know it. I claim it. I hate it.
Is it my DNA that makes me this way? Is it a natural born tendency to want to stay close at home where my own bed is, my own kitchen? What in the world am I afraid of?
In theory, I want to travel the globe. I want to experience what this world has to offer before I die. I want to eat foods that I've never eaten, hear languages I've never heard, see trees that I can't imagine as well as paintings and pyramids, rivers and the sun-baked white buildings of Greece against a sea and sky so blue I can't imagine it.
But I'll never do any of these things if I can't get off my own porch and decide what goes in a suitcase.
I'm thinking about this a lot and I'm trying to figure it out. I'm hoping that our little trip to Chattanooga will give me a boost. It's my husband's and my 23rd anniversary and I want to be able to go everywhere with him for all the rest of the years we have together. To be an adventuresome and daring woman who says YES to life and means it with all her heart and all her soul.
My husband deserves that but even more importantly, I do too.
I'm going to go pack now and I'm going to try not worry so much about what all I need to take.
Because really, all I really need is what I have- my man, our love, and the ability to jump right in to the big clear waters of life, dive down deep and come up smiling. I know I have that somewhere. I just have to find it.
