The Already and the Not-Quite-Yet

We all find ourselves in places of transition,
in between the already and the not-quite-yet.

It’s our lot in life to choose either to accept or move
on from it,

To embrace the unknown or to reject it for the
comfort of the common and ordinary.

I choose to live in the unknown,
for it is as wild as my heart.

I’m back in an airport, staring off into the bleak darkness beyond, the sun refusing to peek its resplendent head above the horizon, choosing sonder over radiance. It’s the season for travel, it seems, as the lines through security here in Boston are crammed with the mass of humanity that I rarely have the pleasure of seeing. Children, with newly cut hair and bleary eyes, haven’t quite hit their fever pitch of activity, their parents are quietly happy for the moment.

The line at Starbucks is incalculable, the same at Dunkin. Everyone is hoovering up their hot bevies in anticipation of the minutes and hours ahead, hoping for an unnatural boost from their somnolence. I’ve seen more headphones make their way from necks to ears, tuning out the world within these glass and steel walls to the gentle thud of bass and Kanye.

I’m on my way “home” with a brief stopover in Denver because my destination is too small to be served directly by the transportation giants calling Boston home. It’s of no real consequence, save snowfall in Denver, and I’ll get a chance to stretch my legs in Denver’s long halls. And then, over the Rockies and down into the brown and green of Southern California, the ocean twinkling just out of reach.

If home is where the heart is, I suppose I’ve got several. I’m returning to the place I was raised, changed as it may be. I’m living in an apartment in Boston, treading water until my obligations to my ex-wife are complete. I’m living in Ireland, on a farm in the Midlands, chasing another sort of dream entirely with my wife. Soon, I may be elsewhere but that’s the unknown I’ve written about above.

These in-between moments, the not-quite-yet places I find myself in, the existential waiting rooms of the next adventure, can be maddening. They’re anticipatory, always chewing at the edge of our consciousness, begging to “hurry up and get on with it!” in as bleating of a tone as those miniature goats you see on YouTube or Instagram. And yet, biding time is part of the process, part of the method, part of the madness.

I don’t know where you’ll end up this season. I don’t know if you’re at your final destination or if you’re just waiting to depart for the next. I know how it must feel, however, that tugging at your soul. All I can do is suggest that embracing these moments isn’t half bad. It gives you the opportunity to observe, to interact, and to plan what yet may be. It gives you the possibility of hope, that many-feathered thing.

So, my dear souls, embrace the in-between as an opportunity to grow and develop and, when you finally embark on the next journey, you’ll have your wits and ways about you.

May it ever be so.