Standing Still

Sometimes I feel like I'm just standing still while watching everyone pass me by. Their lives, their movement, the calls on their life that take them to new places.

I'm left here firmly planted with roots running deep. And though parts of my heart and life move that never moved before, watching others pick up and go leaves me feeling as though I'm never really moving and never really going and maybe I missed something. Suddenly, I begin to feel more stuck than settled.

Several friends have gone. I see their faces and can hear their laughter and remember a hundred memories as I recall who they are and what took them away. Tonight, I say farewell to my cousin. Another friend will be gone by the spring.

Goodbyes are hard. They feel easier somehow when you know they should be leaving and it's good for them to go. But then they feel hardest when you know that maybe you're still supposed to be where you are too - left in the known and the familiar and the same. It's difficult watching others begin a brand new chapter of their life that takes them on a grand adventure outside of the place you've always lived life together. Their adventures take them away from my own familiar way of living and doing. It changes my normal and I'm left in the same place, and then I'm left with less because all I have is the void and the space that only they filled. All of this leaves me disrupted and unsettled as though I was the one packing up and moving away.

It struck me the other day that Todd and I have lived in our house longer than we've lived in any other place together. The carpet is worn and some things look tired and nothing is crispy and fresh anymore. It's home though and I'm happy it's home. Yet part of me wishes it was our turn to be taken somewhere new too. For home to take on a new form.

I've always wondered what it would feel like to be the one that was leaving. I wonder how it would feel for others to be saying goodbye to us. To be the guests at the going away party. To be the one seated in the chair as others prayed over before we headed off into the unknown. Those things feel intangible and hard to imagine.

I'm grateful for home. For permanence, for routine, for family close by, for long Texas summers and the comforts familiarity brings. And I long for more. I long to be moved, to change, to go. I long for newness and the glorious discomforts of being stretched by changing surroundings and circumstances.

Our roots aren't uprooted...they remain. I'm curious what new chapters of life might look like when so much stays the same.