Passenger

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry Fifty-Three

There was a time when people took drives for no reason at all.

No destination.

No itinerary.

No reservation waiting at the other end.

Just a tank of gas, a stretch of road, and a willingness to see what might be waiting beyond the next hill.

I remember pieces of those drives from childhood.

Not many.

My memory has always been selective that way.

But some moments remain.

A station wagon.

A summer night.

Sitting on the hood watching fireworks bloom against the darkness.

Roads that seemed to go on forever.

I do not remember where we were going.

I only remember that nobody seemed concerned with arriving.

Yesterday, my son drove.

For a few hours, I became the passenger.

The roads rolled beneath us. Hills rose and fell. The sky shifted between cloud and sunlight. Fields blurred into the horizon and disappeared behind us.

And somewhere between one bend in the road and the next, I realized something.

For a few hours, I had stopped trying to arrive.

Not because I was lost.

Not because I was tired.

Not because I had given up on anything.

I simply wasn't steering.

I wasn't watching the clock.

I wasn't calculating the next turn.

I wasn't wondering how much farther remained.

I was looking out the window.

It sounds simple.

Perhaps it is.

Yet it felt strangely sacred.

The older I get, the more I notice how much of life is spent reaching toward the next thing.

The next task.

The next answer.

The next goal.

The next understanding.

Even wonder can become something we chase.

As though every question must eventually surrender its answer.

As though every road owes us a destination.

Yet the road outside my window seemed entirely unconcerned with such things.

It disappeared over hills I could not see beyond.

Curved around corners that revealed themselves only when we arrived.

And for once, I found that I did not need to know.

There was a conversation I once had with my son.

I was speaking about all the things I still wonder about.

The questions that remain unanswered.

The mysteries that continue to linger at the edges of understanding.

And he said something I have carried with me ever since.

"If you knew everything, there would be no wonder left."

At the time, I smiled.

Yesterday, I understood.

Wonder and wandering may be closer cousins than we realize.

Both require a willingness to travel without certainty.

Both ask us to trust what lies beyond our sight.

Both invite us into a relationship with mystery.

Perhaps that is why the drive felt so beautiful.

Not because of the sunset.

Though it was beautiful.

Not because of the winding roads.

Though they were beautiful too.

The beauty was in the surrender.

The beauty was in allowing the road to remain ahead of me.

The beauty was in not needing to know what waited beyond the next rise.

For a few hours, I stopped trying to arrive.

I simply watched the world unfold.

And in doing so, I was reminded of something I am forever forgetting:

Life is not always asking me to steer.

Sometimes it is asking me to notice.

The road.

The sky.

The people beside me.

The mystery beyond the hill.

And the quiet grace of being carried for a little while.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai