Home (Installment One)

“You keep talking about these problems," the swami motions in the temple air with his hand.  He continues to Archana, "Let's not even talk 'big picture.'  'Pay attention to the 'inner picture.'"

That's the way my sister-friend relayed the epiphany moment she experienced during her recent trip to India.

Some day soon she and I will travel together to that land of her birth, the villages of her parents, and be overfed by her aunties, sip tea, and allow her to share directly with me that version of her home, that part of her identity.  On that day a couple of weeks ago, however, we traveled together in lengthy conversation from cackling and hooting about some of our sorrier days as awkward third graders at St. Thomas Elementary to snarky rants about the late shenanigans of our children, and to feeling our ways messily through our respective inner pictures.  

I had been focused for so many months on detailing, addressing, and checking off a grotesque number of tasks related to our family's move from our Maroa-Forsyth home of twenty years to Chad's hometown of Watseka.  If I can just get for the kids the information about their schools and activities, then they'll be able to imagine what the future holds  .  .  .  If only I could get the artwork all hung up on the walls of the new house and completely decorate the kids bedrooms, then maybe it will feel like home before school starts  .  .  .  If I get the address updated on my driver's license, and register to vote in Iroquois County, and meet the neighbors, and .  .  .  and so went on and on the five pages in the typed "Moving To Do" packet I had created for my path forward.  (Stop laughing at me Archana.  There was not any cross-referencing between lists nor was laminating involved.) 

By September I found myself saying, "I don't want to wish away time -- I know better than that, but I sure will be glad when it's a year from now."  I was weary, like to the depths of my soul weary, of putting together a new life in a new place -- for the kids, for the house, at the new job, new church, new doctor, new beautician, new veterinarian (I'll spare you from any more of the list).  I could do nothing on comfort-zone autopilot -- everything took extra mental energy, and so, naturally, I pushed onward through the list as my way to peace.

Except that it wasn't.

It served it's purpose, but the time for solving these problems and even for big picture reflection had largely passed.  No matter how many more phone calls I made, errands I ran, answers I found, there would continue to be yet more mail delayed in forwarding, more names that I failed to remember quickly enough, and the wrong turn taken onto 2nd street when I should have hung that left on 3rd.  If I'm ever to exhale, I must be still.

"Huh," I uttered contemplatively.

"Inner picture," I said resolutely.

An internal locus of control was something I knew about since my undergrad days -- Dr. Rolf Craft -- Enterpreneurship (E&B 331W).  However, living from the inner picture was a matter entirely different, and this huge life upheaval had me so action-oriented that I failed to recognize when I'd passed my train stop.  I'm looking forward to that future trip to South Asia, but a phone call from Iowa to Central Illinois offers up some pretty effective "Eat, Pray, Love."

Just.

Be.

Still.

Here and now.