We hadn’t been out of our house for four days when first someone asked us about what we were doing with our lives. My sister had surprisingly refrained from asking too many questions. But here, at a table of strangers, still at dock in Galveston for a cruise that was to be the kickoff for our new life, one of our table mates was curious as to who we were and what we were up to. Natural enough, considering that we were to be sharing meals for the next ten days, but I was a bit taken aback by the question. We are semi-retired, we said, and in the first stages of starting a new business, we hemmed and hawed, uncertain as to what to say.

In the coming days, we became fast friends, and our travel companions were encouraging to us. But the question lingered in my mind, and now, months later, I still find myself wondering; Who are we, and what are we doing? How did we end up going down this road? Did it all begin the day we boarded that ship?

My initial inclination was to say no. The cruise was a vacation taken before we embarked on the odyssey that we are currently in the midst of. Because I was so enamored of the idea of the great American road trip, my tendency was to believe that the morning that we left Texas heading north was the start of it all. Symbolically at least, our adventures began the morning before we left, as I stood by my parents’ gravestones, saying goodbye and feeling a little guilty for abandoning them despite the fact that they have been gone for some years now. As I brushed away the dirt and disposed of the dead flowers, I felt as though I was saying goodbye to my old life and blindly setting off on a new one.

Looking back now though, I see that there are other candidates for the genesis of this journey. There was a day last spring- exactly what day I can’t say- when Wendy and I decided that it was time for us to make a change. I had recently left my job and Wendy was more than ready to leave hers; she’d put in her time and was ready to move on to something more personally fulfilling. We thought we had enough in retirement savings to take a gamble on ourselves, and so with the loosest of plans, we determined to make the leap. Maybe that was the real beginning of our quest for the life unknown.

Or maybe this expedition really began the day that Wendy gave notice that she was quitting her job. After weeks spent bringing projects to their natural conclusion, I know that it was cause for some celebration. Though not as much as when she actually worked her last day. Beers were drunk and so were we… that was certainly the day that we celebrated our emancipation. What a great feeling, to throw off the shackles of the workaday world.

Of course, that ending had a beginning too, when she got that job because someone knew her from the previous job, so I guess we have to go back to then. Or perhaps we have to look even further, to when we moved to Austin to take that first job, leaving behind small town east Texas. Or to the moment a few years earlier when Wendy decided to go to graduate school. In my attempt to figure out when this whole venture started, I might have to go back to when Wendy and I first got together. Or it could be that I have to go back to when we were born. Or our parents were born. Or when the first people walked this earth. Or and or till the beginning of time itself.

Which leads me to the obvious conclusion that we are always at the beginning. For every ending, for everything that gets left behind, there is a new beginning. For every breath that we exhale, there is an inhalation, until there are no more breaths, and then…? We are forevermore riding the wave of now and the crest of that wave is the source of all new creation.

So there, sitting amongst a table of strangers (and future friends,) stumbling through some semblance of an explanation as to who we are and what we are going to be, is apt enough an answer to the question of when this journey began.
Now, I guess that insofar as those other questions are concerned- who are we and what are we up to- we’ll have to wait for another day.

STAY TUNED.