Saturday started as magic day. Everyone slept late, and then took naps. (Eliot slept four hours!) We watched two football games and ate a lot of pretzels. Lincoln asked for us to sit on his bed with him and then he fell asleep too. We read books and made a fantastic vegetable tart, which the boys wouldn’t eat, which meant there was more for us.
And usually when our lives go particularly calmly and well, we get restless. (We also do this when things are going badly. So I guess really there’s no end to it.)
So at 4pm, we decided we needed some adventure in our lives and agreed that we would be good at doing a quick hike. (Spoiler alert: we are never good at doing quick hikes.) It had threatened rain all day, but it hadn’t actually rained in a couple hours! Everyone napped so everyone would be happy! It was only a 3 mile hike round trip, so it would be no problem!
I did have somewhere to be at 7, so we threw what we thought we needed in the car. In a shocking turn of events, we did not actually remember everything we needed in the 3 minutes between when we were comfortably at home and when we were all buckled in the car. Most notably, we forgot Eliot’s fuffii (pacifier), and when we discovered it, we decided it would probably be fine anyway. At any rate, we had already started off, so it was too late.
We made our way through the jungle by stroller, carrier, and foot, through and around the puddles, underneath the heavy green archways above us. Occasionally we were passed by hikers who did not have small children and who could actually go at the pace that we like to imagine that we can go. Whole clumps of flowers littered each side, with the heavy vines occasionally just off the path.
Two thirds of the way up, as the muddy slopes got steeper, Eliot became exceedingly disgusted with our forgetfulness of his fuffii, and Lincoln was told he had to walk. Both resulted in tears and an even slower pace, but we encouraged them and ourselves with the belief that we were almost there.
But we were almost there. In a few minutes we scrambled up the slick volcanic rocks to the base of a 30 foot waterfall. Everyone hungry and tired and grumpy, but we were at the foot of a clear, cool, Hawaiian waterfall.
We gave ourselves time to splash a bit, and threw some rocks in already overflowing puddles, and laughed up into the drops that sprayed out from the heavy gushing over the cliff. And Eliot fell down until he was covered in water, and Joe and Lincoln climbed as close as they could to the falls.
Everyone was upset when we had to leave quickly. But the rain was falling harder and the rocks were getting slicker and the dark was moving over the mountains. So we packed everyone up and cried about it, and started our long, wet, way back down.
Julie Glass says, “When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be,” and it meant something for us this weekend. It meant that while we had a beautiful day, calmly and quietly at home, and everything was fine, and we gave it up to hike an unknown trail late when we did not have enough time…..and we did that precisely because that’s what we wanted to do.
Often the life that we want to lead finds its way through to us anyway, no matter what we pick. We almost always lead the life we want to lead, and this should both relieve us and scare us. It should scare us because it means that what Annie Dillard says is true: “How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.” It means that the thing that we do every day is both what we want and what we become. So if we say we want something but we consistently end up in the same places then it might mean that we don’t actually want what we say we do.
But it should relieve us, because if we know who we actually are, then we trust that the life we want will find us anyway, even if it is not quite possible at the moment.
And maybe it is a call for us to be honest with ourselves: to find who we really are, even if it is something we wish we weren’t. Maybe we say always say we want to be this or that, but we do not do the work. Often this means that we eventually have to admit that we aren’t that person after all, so we take a deep breath, we dig through the rubble of our idyllic, imaginary selves, and then we keep on searching for who we actually are.
Maybe learning about ourselves means discovering that our dream is actually to read good books with a glass of tea instead of studying Arabic, and if that’s the case, then being honest about that to ourselves and others is surely a better decision then constantly being defensive and guilty about why we are not accomplishing whatever it is we insist we want to accomplish.
So for us, for our family, it means we often (metaphorically and literally) end up at waterfalls at 6pm in the pouring rain because that is, in fact, exactly where we want to be. And it is a little ridiculous and maybe a little unsafe, and probably definitely not the best time to be there.
But we live the life we love.
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