There and Back Again

Months more pass, and again I find myself writing for the first time in forever. Life seems to so easily get in the way of living.

But it goes on.

The days pass, the seconds tick by. Days roll into seasons, into years. I find myself, hours before Shabbat arrives, in a cathartic moment of flipping through the pictures Facebook tells me I'm in. Nearly five years condense to a few websites of past memories.

Maybe I'm a little over-tired from two long days of travel around the north, prone to sentimentality and making something out of nothing. Perhaps I should ignore all the thoughts, excitements and regrets welling up inside as I trek through my own history. Maybe it's just been a long week, after an amazing few weeks with the family on the other side of the world.

I did take quite a trip recently.

If you take a globe and put one finger on Israel, then take a piece of string and find the exact opposite side of the planet, your finger would fall very close to French Polynesia.

This land is opposite from Israel in every way possible. Israel is the land of consonants, Polyneisa all vowels. Polynesians love pork, Jews here struggle to even let a swine touch the ground. Polynesians celebrate the natural world, spend their days in the sun on the beach, worship pearls and have dark, gleaming skin. Twelve hour time difference, night-to-day, the other side of this globe. Enough said.

I step off the plane after forty hours of travel and could not feel more alien to the space around me, more a foreigner, more upside down and backwards. What is this place?

There, I spent two weeks with family, full days of love and laughter and celebration. And as quickly as it happened, I'm back, again in Jerusalem, the pull of this place exerted its thrust. As amazing a time as I had, as beautiful as was the paradise-like scenery, as memorable as are all the smiles of so many people that I love so dear, I can't help but feel like maybe, just maybe, it never happened. Maybe I dreamed it up. Maybe, I'm right back where I started.

Physically, of course, I am. I sit in my room, with a view of South Jerusalem, as the sun dips near the tops of the mountains on the horizon, writing, just as I did two months ago, and six, and eight. Nothing changed. It's all the same.

To every season, turn, turn, turn.

Was I renewed as a person? Was my being altered by a two-week stint in heaven?

Probably not.

So then what is it for? Why the extravaganza?

If I wake up every morning and do the same thing all over again, if, despite all the pushing and tugging, exertion of all sorts I end up right back where I was a moment before, why try?

The truth, teaches Bilbo Baggins, is that the experience itself is the growth, that we come back to where we were to display, to exert, to be, the new person that we have become. Because after fights with goblins and trolls, humans, dwarves and elves, encounters with fire-breathing dragons and a poor halfling named Gollum. He comes back having an experience that no one of the Shire could even begin to understand. He comes back with more gold than he could ever spend, and a treasure more great and awful than he could ever imagine.

But all he can do with these memories is write a book to share with himself.

There and Back Again.

He went. Now he's back. The meaning is all hidden in the middle. But he keeps it all to himself in a selfish missed-opportunity for growth.

In a sense, I may be looking at my past travels backwards. Am I back now? Or really there? Or, perhaps, the whole title is wrong.

Because I can only be back again, if I was ever here in the first place. And that initial being, is only my being of now, if I let myself come back unchanged, unmoved. I'm here, again, but this here is now a new here entirely.

If I live in the then and the what-will-be, if I live in the pictures of past and longings of what was supposed to be, then I went there, and came back again.

So all there is to do, what there is to strive to do, is to live in the now, in the moment. To be here, be present, be now. It is a labor not easily achieved. But a fight worth fighting for sure.

And, as the moments call our the quick approach of Shabbat, it suddenly dawns on me that that is precisely what this day is for.

Stop. Be. Live.

Sunday to Friday I can go around the world, traversing the planet and doing all there is to do. But now this is the day that God gave as God's gift.

I went there. Now, I'm back. Again.

Shabbat shalom.