Enjoy Getting Over The Hill

It is accepted that youth has a dispensation to wander. After all, young people have strong limbs, few responsibilities and a sense of invincibility. Why not take a year off and bicycle around Europe, join the Peace Corps, or backpack through Asia? Sleeping in hostels, eating cheap noodles and having adventures is a rite of passage. Obligation finds us soon enough.

But what about "the unsettled" who can't sink gracefully into middle age? The ones viewed by "the settled" as slightly cracked because we fix up the perfect house in the perfect place, then sell it and leap into the unknown at an age when we ought to be more worried about the solvency of Social Security than what's over the next hill?

I had lots of time to think about this while steering a 6-ton moving van down an empty interstate, feasting my eyes on mountains to one side, prairie to the other. Beside me, his four-hour shift behind the wheel finished, my husband dozed with a baseball cap shading his face. Behind me, wrapped in blankets and hidden in boxes, were the trappings of three generations -- precious remnants of numerous garage sales, farm auctions, the Great Depression, a couple of floods and a tornado my grandparents and parents had lived through.

Over the years I'd paid far more in storage fees than the artifacts were monetarily worth, but despite spousal pressure and escalating costs, I'd stubbornly clung to them as touchstones to loved ones lost and happy times lived. 
Now, headed away from another former hometown, I was again among "the unsettled." At dawn, passing the river for the last time, a doe and her twins, their spotted fur gleaming like velvet in the early light, had forced us to stop and honor their deliberate passage across the road. We took it as an official farewell, and I cried all the way down the canyon on the way to the interstate.

By late afternoon my vision had cleared and my heart felt lighter with every passing mile. I had no idea what lay ahead of us, except another storage locker and the dream of someday putting my treasures in a cabin by another river. Unlike yesterday, when we'd embraced sad friends and futily tried to explain that their booming resort town just didn't feel like our small village anymore, I was no longer melancholy. Rather, I was excited, energized, ready for the next adventure.

Security and safety are illusions. All the insurance policies, electronic gates, padlocks, safety deposit boxes, pension plans, 401(k)s, mutual funds and employment contracts in the world can't make any of us, settled or unsettled, invulnerable to change. Even if we think we're standing still, the world around us keeps moving.

I've always preferred to meet change head-on rather than wait for it to find me. That's how I test myself, push the edge of the envelope, shake myself out of complacency. How would I have known I could drive a 12,000-pound truck if I hadn't done it? I would never have found a meadow with a creek and a flat cabin site unless I'd taken a "wrong" turn. The best way to make new friends is to search them out.

I'm glad the only way to find out what's beyond the next hill is to go over it. 

© 2000 The Women Syndicate

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