In Front of Me

In late March, I fled my apartment in Washington, DC to my parents’ home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. As I traveled north, I watched the life I had created in the city slowly disappear in the rear windshield. I had plans to finally visit that Smithsonian I kept saying I would, to rock climb in West Virginia, and maybe even head to Moab. But as my car sped along empty interstates, it became clearer with each mile that none of that was going to happen anymore. 

Now, my travels are condensed within a small radius of my childhood home. I’m mountain biking the trails where my father first taught me how to ride. I’m walking down to the cove where I spent countless summer days in the polka dot one-piece splashing in tidepools. In some ways, everything is exactly how I left it. The ocean waves never stopped beating against the shore. The mountain biking trail to the quarry still has the same slippery root wedged between those three sharp rocks and I still can’t ride over it smoothly. 

I’m back where I learned to love the feeling of gliding my bike over a boulder and how the sun warms my skin as I lay on salt-washed slabs of granite by the sea and how the sunset is always there each night but it never paints the sky in the exact same way. Now I’m re-learning the lessons this place taught me years ago. As anxiety and uncertainty grips me, I’m back where I learned how to sit through discomfort when I capsized in an ocean kayak and floundered upside down, underwater for twenty neverending seconds before I managed to tear off the spray skirt and swim to the surface. Where I learned how to lend myself patience as I tried again and again to shift my tires through a scree-covered hillside without falling. Where I learned to trust that the Atlantic’s waters will eventually shed their icy chill and let me plunge into them for a few fleeting weeks of warmth each August.

Most of all, as I walk the same path to the ocean and flow over the same mountain biking trails, I’m re-learning how to find wonder and beauty in what’s right in front of me. When I eventually leave this home, when the world is pulsing with movement again and I’m back to planning the next far away adventure, I hope I carry that with me.