Innerlogue

I wonder everyday at the amount of time that I spend fretting, fussing and worrying about life. It seems like   trash, dishes, and laundry get the best of my emotional attention on a daily basis. And I hate that.

Instead of wonder about this personal journey I am on, I create lists. Instead of the excitement of discovery,  I feel anxious. Instead of enjoying the finite sweetness of the day, I plan tomorrow.

I think it is my Innerlogue that creates this.

When I was a child in the 1970s, my uncle was the Kiwanis guy who hosted the travelogues in our small Indiana community.  I was sometimes trapped into going to these dry, quiet evenings of slides and comments of traveling neighbors-- my dad belonged to Kiwanis too.

So I heard about places like London, Paris, Florence, Pisa and Venice.

Having had the opportunity to have traveled to these cities, I think I have stumbled on to something. The travelogues were commentary about what tourists enjoy. The pictures were of the familiar landmarks. Beautiful, but not alive.

The difference, I now think, I learned in Pisa. It was 2004. I was traveling with my mom. My heart was broken. My life had been irrevocably changed by loss and I had told no one in my family. I was overwhelmed by my grief. My mom knew I was a hot mess.

I know we saw the the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but what I remember about that day is mom looking in my eyes in the Pisa hotel room and saying to me that it didn't matter what "it" was, this unspoken Innerlogue I was holding. She said quietly, "No matter what it is, you will be ok and I will love you."

And I have a picture of this travel moment. Later that evening she took a picture of me silhouetted in the window of our room, drinking wine and looking out into the midnight Italian sky. My Innerlogue had changed.

I was choosing to be alive in a life I could not yet imagine.