Writing tidbits | 2024
January
I am most alive when I am writing in my head. It’s my spidey sense turned on.
Travel can be a beautiful distraction. Here I am so sensitized by people and scenes that I’m not filled with that deep longing for a family of a my own, for a partner, for someone to travel with.
Do I wish that I had shared any of these adventures with someone else? No, not really. They are beautiful because they existed wholly separate from reality. There is no person from my day-to-day who I shared it with, so I am in my own world when I travel.
We rise above the clouds and I’m reminded — there’s blue just beyond them.
I can’t shake the constant feeling that I’ve forgotten something, lost something.
Is it not so small a thing to say, “I want to see the world”?
Because I do, I really do.
I have an appetite for it all — to be imprinted with every place out there. To be able to look back and say, I know it.
And yet I choose to go back home.
It always makes me laugh when people take pics of art.
I’ve got the whole world inside of me. So I need to see it. I feel the need to expand, to take in space and fill the aching crevices inside me
I’ve been repeating the phrase “the best is yet to come” for half of my life. Only now I don’t know if that’s true.
Because to say the best is yet to come would be a disservice to the past and the present. It is to make the assumptions that we’re dealing with apples to apples. But No two seasons are alike. Each one good and bad, hard and rich in their own ways. Some might be better than others, but it is not this linear, ever increasing slope.
There are seasons I miss, I grieve, that I can never get back. But I am who I am today because of those seasons. I would do them a disservice by asking them to make a reprisal. To live the same life at a different point in time would be hollow, a cost without a soul.
The best is not yet to come. The best lies in my past, my present, my future.
March
I grieve the fact that I will most likely never get the opportunity, the gift of laboring with child. Yes, I pray and hope and ask to carry and grow a baby inside my uterus, but my prolapse means it’s highly unlikely that any doctor will let me labor, let me push, let me contract and feel all the pain and glory of childbirth.
But then I think about the word, labor.
There is labor in the sense of work — our efforts, our toils.
There is labor the verb — to exert, to feel the sweat, the aches, the pains.
There is labor the struggle, the ant pushing the millstone up the hill.
I will labor in life, no doubt. Just maybe not how I thought it would be.
May
I won’t lie, I love to bike fast.
It may just be the reason I don’t like to wear a helmet — because I like to feel the wind in my hair.
I love zipping around marathon-trainees and bar crawlers and Hinge dates. I don’t mind almost brushing someone’s arm because I’m speeding instead of slowing down.
Tonight I was biking, quite fast, and I had the thought — I am the only one racing here.
I am racing against myself.
I am the one setting the pace, telling myself I am not going fast enough, that I need to pedal faster and kick things into gear.
It felt like a metaphor for life — when I can easily get sucked into the thoughts of “You haven’t done enough / you’re behind / You need to speed things up” — no one else is saying that but me.
August
It’s a weird feeling, being back from sabbatical. As Dad drove me home last night from the airport, he asked, “So how does it feel? I sometimes find myself, looking around at people and thinking, ‘You have no idea where I’ve just been.’”
I nodded along — “For me, I start to do math — isn’t it wild that 12 hours ago I was in a different country?”
My home felt not quite my own — pristine clean thanks to being cleaned 2 days prior. For some reason my countertops looked different than I remembered. And this morning felt strange. Making my usual breakfast, but instead of going to open my laptop to work … I did nothing.
Well, I put on some clothes and went to Chrome Yellow, which is where I sit now.
But as I was driving over here, my eyes a little ache-y and head a little space-y, I felt very out-of-body. Just going through the motions of familiar blinker-flipping and turns, and at the same time, feeling like this wasn’t quite home.
Funnily enough (and I did laugh when I realized this) Haley was seated at Chrome when I walked in. And to think I chose a coffee shop where I thought I might not see anyone.
Thoughts keep running through my head — ones that come like I’m dictating to typist. “Write this down, remember it. Did you get that moment where that happened?”
These moments from the last few weeks pop up in short-reel snippets.
The seagulls every morning in Cornwall.
Me saying to Pete at Creation Fest, “I’ve been thinking, ‘Who do I want to be at the end of my sabbatical?’” And him going, “That’s a very Gen Z question to ask.”
Alex at 26 grains telling me, “You should open a cafe of your own.”
The canal volunteer stopping me to talk about all of Great Britain’s waterways and the need for more funding.
The sinking feeling sitting on the railing of Esther’s porch in Gimmelwald.
Rain pouring outside of a Villar coffee shop while Martha and I talked boys.
Biking alongside that old man along the Seine at 11:30 pm on the night of August 7. That cat-and-mouse game of who is ahead of who, only to line up side by side at a stop light. Him sticking his arms out while pedaling, like a little boy pretending to fly, and me laughing at the sight. Him asking me where I’m from at a stop light, as if the temporary USA tattoo wasn’t a dead giveaway. Then asking what was my favorite thing about Paris, and me saying, “This is it. Just biking in Paris.”
Walking around Lake Geneve and William asking — “What kind of mom do you want to be for your kids.” “I know I can be fun and bring out their imagination. But I hope I’m always able to be what they need in the moment. If they need a hug, that I’ll know to give them a hug. If they need me to challenge them, I’ll give them a nudge. I’ll be quiet when they need me to say nothing, to just listen. And when they need fun, I’ll make them giggle and think outside the box.”
Sitting on a dock in Lausanne, towel semi-wrapped around my damp swimsuit, and William challenging me to ask God for a word for him. Closing my eyes, and breathing deep. Listening for a phrase, for a peace. “You are more than your works.”
Nic asking at the last night of L’Abri’s bonfire — “So what’s been the meat of your sabbatical?” I laughed and said, “Well, I thought this would be.” Him saying, “Yeah, I gave up on that.” Then asking, “Would you say you’re rested? Emotionally, physically, spiritually?” “Yes to emotional and spiritual. No to physical — I haven’t been sleeping well. That 5:30am sunrise can be a beast.”
Explaining to people over and over again my travel evolution, and why I love solo travel.
Landing in JFK airport, and almost saying Merci and Pardon to strangers.
Telling everyone about my sabbatical journal, my friends who gave me the gift of questions. Telling them about Dave’s question of bumping into Jesus, imagining what he would say, and me asking myself that every day.
And today? Today, he’d say, “McKenzie, you are home. Let yourself be home. Celebrate where you were, but do not long to be where you are not.”
