Looking Backwards
"When people are showing you around, your instinct will be to look forward but be sure to keep looking backwards so you can find your way home" (thanks Shawn!). Today marks my first MONTH on the road, and for the past four weeks I've been actively collecting advice, information, histories, homing rituals, exploring rituals. My new year's resolution was "Nest" (yes also my tattoo, yes I'm obsessed), and right now the way I'm thinking about it is twofold.
One aspect I think of as cultivating a groundedness of self - weaving together a coziness in my growing awareness of my body and how to use it, my items and the way I arrange them, my thoughts and the way I articulate them. I'm continually learning better ways to pack, wheel, cook, communicate and care.
The other aspect I think of as honing the skill of reading people and environments in order to best accommodate, adapt to, care for, and connect with them. I'm developing a calm confidence in that skill (admittedly with bouts of raging insecurity!) - working on remembering names, expressing gratitude, noticing and respecting the details of a space, asking questions. Ideally both of these facets to nesting twist together into a unified collection of strategies for settling into uncertainty and responding sincerely, strategies for being open, for being in the moment. Always, it's a continual gathering, an ongoing creation. Process process process.
Last month I had the absolute honor or staying with five different hosts in Edmonton, which gave me so much opporunity to ponder and practice these processes of nesting, and I am enormously, inexpressibly grateful. So far I feel like I've grown more as a traveler than I have as an improviser, and at first I felt a little weird/guilty about that. Then I excitedly realized what is now glaringly obvious: THEY'RE THE SAME!
Engaged travelers and improvisers will seek groundedness in themselves while also cultivating genuine awareness and love for the places and people around them, will continually open themselves up to discovery and play, and will continually look backwards to make sense of the present. Always - it's a practice, a process, and I'm far from perfect at it. I get lost a whole lot. But I'm learning! Nesting! Yey!
