Revisiting the Path
Today will be a shorter post due to the various bits of coordinated travel that need to happen between now and when I board my next flight home to Emma this evening. In the interim, one more piece of the puzzle has been put into place, and only a few more remain.
Today, I started at 430am with the rude awakening my alarm likes to provide. If it’s not yelling at you to get up, it’s quietly chewing through the hours and minutes to get to the next opportunity to do so. Anyway, my flight left for Chicago at 730am, and I was downtown by 11 am central time. My meeting, and why I flew here, was at 1130am and ended at 118pm or so, and now, with the balance of my time, I’m wandering the streets a bit.
Chicago is an old haunt of mine for several reasons, most concerning because my family had roots in this location. My dad went to the University of Illinois Chicago for med school, my mom taught elementary school in a local suburb, and my grandparents lived in a further west suburb until I was a second year in university. Between all these life events, I’ve had a few relationships based here, both business and personal, and it represents a lot of challenges and growth for me.
Not all has been perfect, and much like the fencing and construction around the Bean you see here, my life has been under that continual remaking and rebuilding. Sometimes, it takes the beautiful agony of a place and people to kindle the refining fires we need in our hearts. Regardless of what was, revisiting Chicago after an absence of a few years is a reliving of stories and foundations.
I don’t know if you have places like these where the shadows and the sun are equal. I don’t know if, in your heart of hearts, you still have the oases that carry your soul when the rest of the world is hell-bent on tossing you aside. I suppose these secret places of the soul exist for a reason, and even though Chicago isn’t that way for me today, it once was. Perhaps now, it’s Ireland, perhaps soon, Nova Scotia or Copenhagen. The world awaits the story.
As with everything, I wish for you only that your soul recognizes its history and healing. That who you are today doesn’t remain a static totem to the paths you’ve walked down and instead becomes a living testament to who you have yet to become. In the renovation of your soul, I wish you to find the reckless joys of your Chicago, your moment of becoming.
May it ever be so.
