When the going gets tough, the tough go traveling!
An excerpt from Adventures By Sailplane
B.S. (By Sailplane) B.C. (Before Cancer)
July 1995
I am nervous, afraid. Sometimes I wonder if I have lost my mind. I have lost everything else that ever mattered to me, but somehow I don’t think that I have parted with my sanity. At least not yet. Parting with that is, however, always an option. One which some would suggest I am exercising now.
I run through my checklist. Clothes for three months, a newly purchased and hurriedly programmed notebook computer, books to read, and my airplane. Whiskey Oscar. I am taking leave of my life and perhaps my senses. I am taking my glider cross country to fly, to travel and to see what I may see.
Leaving behind a perfectly good job, a nice house, a settled life. I guess I appear to be a bit erratic. But au contraire, what you are witnessing is actually a brave act of sanity in an insane world. I am leaving behind all the social mores that bind me; the senseless power struggles of the work-a-day world and the cruelty and betrayal that passed for my marriage. Poof! All Gone. It is all behind me, like clutter in a closet, and I am closing the door.
As I close the door to my house, I am ready to leave. But I am not. I fear going, I fear staying. The fear of the known, of the endless dull litany of a life not mine is greater than fear of the unknown, and that differential as much as anything seals my fate. I will go.
My stomach announces its misgivings. Am I making a reasonable decision? Have I lost my mind? The line between sanity and insanity, between acceptable an unacceptable, no longer exists and I no longer know.
My mind has been in a state of disarray since the night my husband informed me he was in love with his nurse. I have been unable to make sense of things. Of the many years we spent building a life together. Of all the little moments, of the difficulties, of the insanity of it all. Nothing has quite fit or flowed since that evening and now I realize that I cannot live the rest of my life this way. But I have no where to go, no one to go to. I need to find a place for me, a place that is mine, without the memories of my past staring at me daily.
But where to?
I haven’t a clue. All I know is that when the going get tough, the tough go traveling and that is exactly what I intend to do. Three months on the road and in the air, to see what I may see. I put the key in the ignition and a song comes over the radio:
“We gotta get out of this place
If it’s the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place
Girl, there’s a better life for me and you…”
There is and I am going to find it.
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