A Five-Minute Reflection -- World Travels and the Inner World

^{Evening on the bay in Hoquiam, Wash. This spot is less than a half hour walk from my apartment.}

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I used to fancy myself a world traveler.

In my 20s, I made a rule: never live more than five years in the same spot.

Back then I lived in Indiana. I kept the rule pretty consistently … but I only rambled around from place to place in northern Indiana, moving from Millersburg (the land of the Amish) to South Bend with the Notre Domers to Rochester with its strange, backwoods recluses.

But it was all the same, mostly white, Christian, and conservative, which I certainly was and am not.

So I finally took a leap, in 2013, close to the 5-year mark in one of my locales, and moved across the country to Washington state, which was reliably blue, having voted for Obama twice and to legalize both marijuana and gay marriage.

Of course, I ended up in the reddest part of the blue state (Grays Harbor County), simply because it's where I could afford to live.

I've been here nine years, breaking my rule once already, and I don't see myself sticking to it again. Maybe it's my age (46) that has caused me to slow down. I'm sure that's part of it.

But I've also come to realize (really know, not just understand or accept intellectually) that the most important change, the most effective and most powerful, is the change that happens within.

I can't tell you how many times I've encountered circumstances and situations that I thought I had left behind in Indiana, but which came around again in Washington. Because they had nothing to do with the place, but with me, with my issues and hangups.

Seeing those situations again, in a new place, might have helped me to be more aware of them, and certainly it affirmed the need to make new choices and deal with them. (Obviously they're gonna keep following me around until I do.) And in dealing with them over the past 8 years, I have seen my life shift and become noticeably, even radically different, even though I've lived in the same spot for a long time.

I might travel a bit more. I do love to see new places. But I don't know that I'm going to pick up stakes and move again. I certainly don't feel the need to move anymore.

My focus now is on discovering, working on, and creating in my inner landscape, and enjoying the new that gathers around me because of that work.

The inner world creates the outer world.

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^{A view from my favorite spot on the Hoquiam River, just one block from the apartment I've lived in for 8 years. Considerations of my inner landscape aside, how could I move?}