There's something in here about the journey...

I watch back episodes of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations when I eat.  They're just perfect.  I get to see a different place, it lasts for 40 minutes tops, it's funny and a little wicked.  I can turn it off if I'm not amused and feel no compulsion to finish them.

I was taking a break from all the packing this week to watch the Malaysia episode.  It's a really good one.  Not for the food he eats and describes, but for the commentary.  He has this running theme throughout the episode, the idea of travel itself, of a journey and how it changes you.

I've been thinking a lot about our year here in Brunswick.  I've been making some rounds and spending time with my few but beloved friends.  I've been saying good-bye and it's been much harder than I had anticipated.

I came home from visiting my friend C and her adorable newborn G and the Boy's friend E, and I finished the Malaysia episode and Bourdain was asking if it was possible to feel enriched and hollowed out at the same time and I thought--YES.  That's how I feel right now.

Full to the brim with love for these amazing women, but also drained from the year that has been.  Full of impossible wishing that I could gather all my friends together in one central location and we could all live there and also gutted by the residency, by assorted trials and by exhaustion.

Bourdain went on to talk about the necessity of travel, how it's often hard and ugly and gut-wrenching and sometimes heartbreaking.  But it's supposed to be.  That's how it changes you.  You come away from it a different person, a better person and hopefully you leave something good behind you too.

I agree.  I couldn't say it any better.  Well, except to say that maybe LIFE is more than simply travel.  Life is often hard and ugly and gut-wrenching and sometimes heartbreaking.  It's also sometimes comical and golden and sweet.  But at the end of the day it's supposed to be all of those things--the good and the bad.  And it's in the living of life that we change.  We grow.  Hopefully, we become incrementally better every day.  And even more hopefully, we're leaving the places we've been, the people we know incrementally better too.

Today is moving day for us.  The day when we cease to belong to one place and for a period of time we are indefinite travelers, bound to no where in particular.  Tomorrow we will belong to North Carolina again.