Rolling with the Punches Here

I’ve been thinking about resiliency: how as a skill, a character trait, a practice, it helps you lead a satisfying life no matter what changes come your way.  You plan for one thing, something else happens, and you change your plan to accommodate. You roll with the punches.  

This sounds so sensible, right? And I’ve “rolled with the punches” in my past, to a good degree. I’m still friends with my ex-husband, for example. I’m working on keeping my deceased family members in my memories as their best selves. (Well, that’s been less rolling away from the punches and more recovering from a combo in my corner.) But, let me tell you: this leaving-the-road business is a punch that, surely, I’ll recover from, but rolling away from it is gonna be harder than it seems.  

I’ll try explaining it this way. I’ll move from the boxing metaphor to that space station one I talked about in my post about deciding to leave the road.  I know I’m making a ridiculous statement to compare Tracy and myself to astronauts, but bear with the exaggeration as I try to describe our situation.  

We prepared for this lifestyle on the road, we sacrificed most everything we owned, we said goodbye to everyone we knew. We embarked on a trip (that we thought would never end) just the two of us. We left behind the usual comforts of hot water, of community, of stability. In favor of what?

If you’ve read any of my entries the past five years, you know what. Gorgeous hikes, yes! Wild-animal spotting, for sure. Drives on scenic highways and through small towns we’d never know about otherwise. Discovery and wonder and tranquility.  

However, the gestalt turns out to be more about having been away from society, away from normal life. Just, away. It’s like we were living in a yurt in Tibet for five years and are just now returning to the U.S., blinking at the neon signs.  Or, living far above the world, looking at it in a new way, day after day, as we lived our daily lives in a new way.  

Friends who live full-time on the road know this weirdness. They check in with me nearly every day to see how we’re doing. Now that I think about them all, though, I don’t think any of them have been on the road non-stop like we’ve been, for as long or as relentlessly. I joke about different levels of being a hard-core nomad—Doug and Melanie getting excited when they’re camped near a pit toilet, Marcus and Shana doing a long stint in their van, Black Betty. But they’ve all taken breaks in their own ways, time spent in place, in larger RVs. Other nomad friends have rented a house for a few months, or bought a lot in an rv community as a home base.  We’ve stayed out there, traveling day after day, putting in the hard work of planning, towing, fixing what breaks, being strangers in every town, hitching back up and doing it again. For years.  

To suddenly stop is harder than moving house. Weirder than coming home from a long trip. More disorienting than starting a new job in a new career. It feels like our command module has splashed down into the ocean. We need time to adjust to this life we led just five years ago, that feels like a lifetime ago. Really, life in place feels like it was a dream; our life on the road was our time awake. 

Now we have to start thinking about what we do in terms of time instead of place. (When did we get that vaccine—in South Carolina or California? When did I last wear these boots, was it the Yukon?) I have to learn how to drive a car again. Tracy has to learn to let go of his dream to never stop driving, to never stop going. I have to deal with my guilt of taking his dream from him. Like I said though, it’s all that together and then the thing that that creates. So, if I’ve been repeating myself on the phone with you lately (more so than usual), or sending stupid texts, or forgetting what a person usually says in a situation, please hang in there with me.  This transition will take time, but the idea is to roll with the punches.