The Journey We Are On
As is our habit these late February winter days, Kit and I rise early each morning when dawn is still over an hour away. Routines have set in because they are a path back to memories that we now must work to revive. In the year since Kit suffered a traumatic brain injury from a fall, we’ve come to treasure our time in this early hour to recall moments from our 44 years of life together as well as from the prior day. After I’ve prepared two coffees with steamed milk, we settle under cozy wool blankets across from each other in the living room where battery-powered candles and an antique amber glass cat lamp provide soft accent light and a sense of peace.
For an hour, I read aloud from our latest book, all recommended by friends from past chapters in our lives. Suzanne in SW France sent three books to us from British mystery writer Richard Osman’s wonderful series about four unlikely friends who live in a peaceful English retirement village in Kent. They meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders and quickly find themselves in the middle of one murder after another. They may all be pushing eighty, but they still have a few unorthodox tricks up their sleeves. Fans of Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club that has become a record-breaking number one bestseller, describe it as “smart, compassionate, warm, moving and very funny.”
I read a few chapters aloud every morning and after dinner. Kit tries to hang on to the storyline and recall the characters’ names and past histories. Hanging on to names and dates in the real world is hard for those of us in our seventies or beyond eighty in Kit’s case. But it is made harder when one’s head is recovering from a brain trauma. With the world saturated with frenetic visual images and a steady steaming of social media, it can be hard to absorb any more information. We hear ourselves say, “My brain is full.” Time to rest and do some meditative forest bathing.
Repetitive exercises to recover or relearn memories are a way to move ahead without the brain feeling scrambled and stressed. What helps is routines. Reading and talking about the storyline and characters. Rereading if necessary. Naps. Exercise out on our deck with a four-wheel standup walker when weather permits, and moderate strength-building sessions at Any Time Fitness Gym.
All trips to town these days are together. I drive while Kit marvels that I always seem to know where I am going and how to get there. That observation reminds me of very early car trips with my parents in the 1950s before I knew about the magic power of maps. Dad drove and my mother navigated with road maps that always lead us to our destination without fail. It was the beginning of my lifelong love of maps and travel.
As I sat down to write this weekly blog, I found myself thinking of prolific travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux and his book, The Tao of Travel. Pulling it from my bookshelf, I take in the book’s unique cover on which a hand extends from the gilded sleeve of a traveler holding a carpetbag ringed with rays of light. Its contents “Enlightenments from Lives on the Road,” are notions on the subject of travel— “often a metaphor for living a life” penned by fellow travelers across the ages and interspersed with reflections by Theroux himself.
In the final chapter of the book, Theroux lists his “Essential Tao of Travel: The ten essentials are as follows: “1. Leave home. 2. Go Alone. 3. Travel light. 4. Bring a map. 5. Go by land. 6. Walk across a national frontier. 7. Keep a journal. 8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in. 9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it. 10. Make a friend.”
As Kit naps early in the predawn the next morning, my thoughts traveled back to February 26, 1975. I’m on the Bangkok to Nongkhai Evening Express Sleeper Train. In the journal I kept and still have, I wrote, “The lights began to dim around 8:30 as the bed maker made his rounds and arranged the sleeper compartments for the passengers…. I had a lower berth—much cooler as it was a particularly stuffy night, and the fan didn’t work. Also, it gave me a chance to sit up as the train pulled into various stations and observe the night activities of hawkers and foot sellers.”
My journal entry concluded: “The moon was full and the night magical. The smoke of fires inside small dwellings scattered among the darkened hills made a beautiful picture that I will carry with me throughout the journey and for all of my life.”
I’d left home and traveled light with journals and maps. Traveling by train, I’d crossed the Mekong River—the national border between Thailand and Laos. Cell phones didn’t yet exist. I made friends along the way. Tao. The way. A metaphor for living life as Kit and I make our way one day at a time on this journey that is our new reality.
