It’s been more than a year since Melissa and I jammed our hiking boots into the Patagonia bag, jumped in the back of a Lyft, and gripped hands in stunned, silent wonder at what we were about to do. It’s been more than six months since we returned to Seattle still glowing with gratitude, our spirits sated and stilled by the glories we had seen and experienced. With the perspective of time, I recall our sabbatical, metaphorically, as one long marvelous hike, a journey that started out giddy with excitement and weighted with gear and expectations, but that transformed at some indeterminant point into a slow, gentle, unburdened amble devoid of a destination. It is that feeling of being unburdened, of wandering in wonder, that I most miss. It was a state of being I can best describe in the negative — an absence of anxiety, or as Tibetan Buddhism would describe it, freedom from samsara. The Dalai Lama, I think, would call it happiness.
Meg left about a week ago for a study abroad program in the south of Chile, in Patagonia. She called me yesterday afternoon in the middle of my workout, her face framed in my iPhone. She looked lovely, a kind of quiet radiance. She was in a coffee shop, cement floor, glass walls, a view over the water to stunning snow-covered peaks. She described it as a nice youth hostel-like place. We talked about her first week, her classes – not terribly rigorous – her posse – twenty-three students with no difficult children – her teachers – large, older white males that “took up a lot of room when they spoke” – and how much fun she was having speaking Spanish in a small, gorgeous town at the tip of the world in a place “you and mom would love!”
Every parent’s heart swells when they think of their children, but our hearts burst when we see them happy, confident, filled up with life. After twenty minutes or so Meg was interrupted by a voice out of my view. It was time for Meg and her friends to head out to the beach to watch the sunset. We lingered on the phone a few minutes longer never knowing how to say good-bye in these kinds of moments, moments so pregnant with life we need the nearness of each other to absorb everything they contain.
After my workout, my phone pinged with a text message from Meg to both Melissa and me. She included a photograph of the water and mountains and setting sun. She wrote, “I am so lucky.”
Gratitude, I think, is the doorway through which we find happiness. I could see it in Meg’s face. Her captivating smile stirred in me the same feeling I had Sunday when the sun finally emerged after weeks of cold, wet rain, the same feeling I had walking the cobblestone streets of Sancerre in search of a croissant. Happiness. Wholeness. A reminder of who I really am unburdened by anxiety, free of fears.
If gratitude is the doorway to happiness, then the only way I have ever found that doorway and managed to squeeze through is by letting go of those stones I picked up on the hike: anger, outrage, frustration, self-righteousness, fear, worry, guilt. Within six months of being back in the States, I have restocked my pack with all of that crushing weight. I know exactly where I picked up those stones, exactly when I put them in my backpack as if carrying them around would make me feel better. Those stones have names: the cowardice of Senators Murkowski, Collins and Alexander, the hypocrisy of Lindsey Graham, the moral emptiness of Mitch McConnel, and the naked, empty ugliness of Donald Trump.
The phone call with Meg reminded me of what I had almost forgotten since returning from our sabbatical – the depth and power of true happiness, the moment when the hike to a destination becomes a wander through endless beauty, the moment when what is true and real and good does not depend on a destination, or a person, or an outcome. I miss the mountains, the endless, empty beaches, the hauntingly beautiful blue of the Mediterranean. Though I cannot live forever in those graced and glorious moments, I take from them the power to face the realities here in the States, the courage to drop those heavy, useless stones that litter my quiet, grateful amble through life.