Transitions and Turtles

 

I went out to coffee with a dear friend last week, and while we caught up on life she told me that she might be approaching adulthood because of two recent developments: she had become an early riser, and she was journaling regularly. I silently calculated how the first point might make me doomed to an eternal childhood, and then I told her how happy I was that she was writing everyday. “You should start a blog,” I said. “Oh, I don’t know,” she responded, “I’m not sure if I’m ready for that yet. I would just hate to be one of those people that start a blog and then don’t stay with it.” I let her words seep into the table beneath our coffee mugs and watched her face as she connected the dots that I had started a blog while in Costa Rica, and I hadn’t updated it in over a month since returning home. Her facial expression seemed to waver between a sheepish, “Well, I didn’t mean you!” and a mischievous, “If the shoe fits…” I laughed and promised on my soy latte that I would not be “one of those people.”

In January I was on a blogging honeymoon where the beaches are white and everything seems new and exciting, and now as of April I have moved back in with my parents in Wenatchee where my surroundings are familiar and comfortable. But the end of the honeymoon is really just the beginning – it’s a transition into the nitty-gritty glories of real life.

Confession: I hate transitions. They are uncomfortable and too slow for my liking. I much more prefer hurtling through time and space to get from point A to point B. In one of my evening yoga classes in Nosara, the instructor asked us to give as much attention to our transitions between poses as we gave to the poses themselves. It was a lot harder to move through the flow with deliberation and awareness in place of speed and momentum. After class was over, everyone dispersed toward their housing that was only a few blocks away, and I was alone in the dark with only Betsy the bike and a 30-minute ride on the beach to my house. I was exhausted and would have given anything to skip over the next half hour to the time where I would be blissfully falling into my bed. As I began to pedal forward, half of a shell caught on my front tire, letting out all the air. Feeling as deflated as my tire, I was hosting a black-tie pity party for myself when something coming out of the ocean caught my attention. It was almost a full moon, and a huge sea turtle the size of a barrel was crawling out of the waves towards me. It was magnificent. And I almost missed it.  

So here I am, back home and trying to embrace the large areas of unknown in my life right now. The turtle might just be the tip of the iceberg of things that I speed right by without a glance of wonder and appreciation. And yes, I just used turtle and iceberg in the same sentence.