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Have you ever visited a place and felt immediately settled? Like you'd finally come home after a long trip? Your breathing is easy, your mind care-free. Perhaps like many, I often feel this sense of ease when I'm on vacation, when I'm away from home. I don't think this has much to do with the fact that we have an infant and so home-life right now is as energetic and busy as away from home. In fact, I think I've always felt this way. I remember as a child I would always want to be away, visiting somewhere new, traveling, even just driving around with my mother.

Some of my favorite memories are of trips and drives I would take with my mother. In the autumn, we would take color tours, driving for the pleasure of the changing autumn leaves, to enjoy the fall color. Sometimes we would find a place to stop and poke around, and I associate these drives with hot apple cider and cinnamon doughnuts.

Now that I live in Florida, the idea of a color tour is a joyful reminiscence. But the notion of finding peace and a chance to settle my mind while in motion is still with me. This returns me to the idea from an earlier post of "being" instead of doing. One of the greatest pleasures of traveling is that we are removed from the demands of daily life; there is not much we have to do and so we are entitled to be. The challenge, then, is to find this sense of breathability and ease when we are amidst the clutter of daily life, the messy desk, the full sink.

When we can access the sense of lightness and ease that pure being engenders no matter where we are, we are truly at home in ourselves.