This week that little climber in pink moved into her dorm at Colorado State University, her first home without a parent in it.
This month Rachel and I are finishing our move out of the place we rented while that little climber in pink finished high school in anticipation of this move.
And now all of us, as we move out, are moving on.
But to what?
A Strange Time to Be New
For the new college student it’s a strange time to be in a new place: COVID distorts every interaction as it has for months, all the more so for students pressed together like castaways: online teaching, classroom distancing, omnipresent masks, virtual meetings, near-quarantining, and testing, testing, testing.
For Rachel and me it’s a new time to be in a strange place: COVID concerns change the dynamics everywhere one might camp, Colorado is on fire, our house is mobile, and we don’t know exactly where we’re spending the winter – much less next month.
In this strange place there’s a lot we don’t know.
The Not Knowing
That’s kind of the whole point.
For someone starting college or someone setting forth on a journey, the whole point is to not fight the not knowing, to not need to show up with everything already figured out.
Because you can’t learn when that happens, and if life isn’t about learning, then, well, I have a lot to learn.
Adventure Demands
For Rachel and me, being on Haven’s Path means being on adventure. And adventure demands two things: something new happening, and enough not knowing while experiencing it to force a new way of seeing the world.
To foster adventure, we’ll be inviting serendipity by saying yes as often as we can.
When the park ranger suggests some new long-way-around hike, adventure demands we take it. When getting to that special fishin’ hole we heard about calls for splashing through a frigid stream, adventure demands we brave it. And when some nearby campers invite us to sit in on their accordion jam session, well, adventure demands.
You can’t learn without adventure, and more importantly, you can’t adventure without learning.
So we’ll be saying yes to both.
We hope that little climber in pink will too.