I was torn. With the introduction of indoor laundry and satellite internet it seemed i was moving away from the old fashioned ways of doing things that i had sought to return to in the first place. It felt wrong and dirty to be moving towards bringing technology to my little slice of wilderness. However, i knew it was necessary. I wanted to take some classes at night…like between 10 pm and 1 am. Classes weren’t offered at that time at the private university in town. However, online courses could be taken at any time of the night, with only assignment and exam due dates set in stone. For what i wanted to do, it would mean at least 6 years of a full course load of classes at night while i spent the day at my job making money to feed us and pay the mortgage and bills. Somewhere in there i would also have to fit “running the homestead”. Sprinkled in would be vet visits, dental visits, and occasional trips to austin. I wasn’t sure how. So i let go of “how”. I’d been reading a new book lately. It talked about what it was to let go, i mean really let go, and give it over to God. I was one of those people who frequently said “yes, but….” i claimed to believe that a higher power was at the steering wheel and that God already had his plan for my life figured out before i even entered the world. And yet, i frequently held fast to the steering wheel while desperately trying to make sense of the map. It was not my job to figure out “how”. It was my job, before all other jobs i held in my life, to listen to the navigation instructions being handed to me one step at a time and drive in the direction i was pointed. I was thankful for the revelation that was given to me along the way to this one which was; there was no destination. There was no moment in life when i would finally be so wise that i didn’t need more teaching, so financially set that i didn’t need to worry about bills, so educated that my job couldn’t cease to exist in society tomorrow, or so happy in where i was in life that there would be nothing to trouble my mind. There was no such destination. The journey itself was the destination, and if i spent the whole life that had been given to me striving to reach the destination, i would have spent each decade fraught with anxiety only to reach death on the last page of the story. When in actuality i should have been looking out the window, stopping to experience the wonders i was passing along the way, and taking pictures to add to my memories. I was going to stop worrying about the destination and experience the now in the thick of it.
