Yesterday as the sun set, I followed GPS directions into a neighborhood tucked between creases of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I instantly adored the place. At the neighborhood’s entrance, there was an empty pond with wooden docks for fishing and barely blooming willows on the banks. Every home was on a half-acre. Every driveway was winding. Yet, despite the beauty of the residential development, the forest was keeping its own dominion, seeming to accept these homes on a temporary basis, patiently waiting to take back full ownership in the future.
God, I hope we live somewhere like this one day, I thought, as I heard the GPS direct me to turn left and down one of the winding drives. I parked, dropped my tailgate, and untied the 1960s dresser I was there to deliver.
I was first greeted by the husband and after we’d unloaded the dresser together, placing it just inside the garage, I met the wife and two kids too as they darted in and out of the house, enjoying a spring night too good to waste on screen. They were all kind, and it seemed, though we’d known each other for only four minutes, that their life was on balance. There was an air of peace—not something I sensed often while delivering furniture—and that air had been earned through hard work. You could just tell.
Passing the pond with its willows on the way out of their neighborhood, I wondered, Where are we (my wife and I) going?
Reflexively, my mind drifted to selling more furniture, securing more restoration opportunities, and turning a better profit at the showroom. If where we’re going is where I just was, I need to make a lot more money, I assessed. I drove home in a tizzy, analyzing the years of work ahead, and by the time I pulled into my driveway, I was a galaxy away from where I wanted to be.
My wife was on our porch talking on the phone to her family. I nodded a brief hello as I hustled down to my workshop to roll paint onto a desk project. An hour later—sixty minutes where I had worked right beneath the threshold of a panic attack because of a relentless mental multiplication of our debt times my age times every other fear under the sun—I was eating dinner with her in our living room and somehow, even further away from where I thought I wanted to be.
Then, we started talking. First, about her day. Then, about mine. Minute by minute, I watched my anxiety descend from its paralyzing heights, as my awareness shifted from mind into reality. And inside this moment, there wasn’t anywhere else I wanted to be, just talking about this complicated but enlivening chapter of our lives, just figuring the next thing out.
When I’d delivered that dresser, I felt something. It made me dream. And as I pondered, Where are we going?, I got the destination confused. The pond was serene. The forest was enchanting. The homes were vast. But the destination I want, was, and will always be, what I sensed there, not what I saw.
I never sensed what I felt there while I was practicing medicine, where I could live in the big house next to the quiet pond, yet always be barred from owning from what I feel now in my living room: peace.
One day, I might sense it too in our home between the mountain’s ridges, but only if I keep earning it, here.
(Every Friday morning, I send an email from the trenches, where I’m working to build a life I love. If you’d like camaraderie on your own journey, follow this link to join our community.)
