Estimated Time of Departure

It's getting down to the wire with one week left and I'm trying to wrap up all the loose ends of my life so I can leave with only future worries to occupy my thoughts. There's more to leaving than you might expect, it was certainly more than I expected. After all of the application steps for Peace Corps, there's all of the steps to actually get there. Apply for a passport, file taxes, consolidate bank accounts, schedule flights, measure luggage dimensions, put everything else in storage boxes... the list goes on. In fact, whatever else is on that list is what I'll be doing this next week. Not to mention trying to "pack up" all the relationships I'll be leaving behind. Sure there are phones and facebook, but even those start to fade away when you can't rely on your daily high-speed wifi and constant cell service.

That might be the hardest part about leaving. Saying goodbye to everyone. Putting human affairs on hold for 2 years. The relationships we have are much more difficult to pack into storage boxes. They don't keep well and when you reopen those boxes after some time, it always seems that some of them have disappeared. It's never quite the same. Having left a few different places, I can say that maintaining relationships with friends is hard to do while moving around. Each time feels like practice for the next time, but with this kind of practice it doesn't seem to get easier. However, our stories continue and they change and we meet new friends and remember old ones, hopefully allowing ourselves to continually be called towards adventure and greatness.

Having said all that, the anticipation is starting to build. My excitement started to go numb from the long process and all of the necessary hoops to jump through, but now that my time is growing short, I'm starting to get those pre-trip butterflies. I'm planning and packing and preparing, but there's always that huge void of the unknown. I might forget something, and I'm sure I'll learn how to live without it. I'll probably bring something that's not very useful, but I'll probably find some use for it. Anything could happen in Honduras. You might even say I'm risking my life - not like our military does with people firing weapons at me, but in stepping into an unknown place, being mis- or uninformed, being a misfit. In the end of Don Miller's book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he talks about how the good, exciting stories are ones where we risk something big. The stories where we lay our lives on the line or others' futures depend on the character - those stories are Epics. Maybe this is something we all aspire to, and who knows if we will, but there's a lot to be risked and a lot of life to be lived!

Next Tuesday is my final day at home. Then I step onto a plane with all that I can carry and start a 2-year adventure, leaving all I've known behind and throwing caution to the wind all in the hopes of a great story. Maybe then my posts can stop being about speculation and rather experience.