I’ve always liked sunsets.
Maybe that’s an occupational hazard when you spend enough time on ships. Out there, sunsets have a way of demanding your attention. One minute, you’re going about your day and the next the sky is on fire overtop the water. Suddenly, everyone stops what they’re doing and watches.
There is something fitting about that imagery as another cruise season comes to an end in Alaska. For the last few months, my life has been measured in ports, sea days, theater schedules, and the occasional morning where I needed a few seconds to remember where exactly I was in the world at that moment. It’s been a hell of a summer, but the sun is finally setting on it now.
And I don’t mean that sadly, or in a bad way.
That’s the thing about sunsets. We tend to associate endings with loss, but nobody every looks at the beauty of a sunset and wishes it hadn’t happened. We stop. We appreciate. Maybe we take far too many photos of basically the same thing. And then we, eventually, watch it disappear below the horizon. Because that’s what it’s supposed to do.
I think I’m getting better at allowing chapters of my life to do the same. There was a time in my life that I probably would have immediately started asking what comes next. The next ship. The next job. The next destination. The next thing I can point toward and say, “There! That’s where I am going.”
I’m not sure I need to do that this time. Because somewhere on the other side of this sunset, there’s already a sunrise waiting. After months of ships, schedules, airports, and far too much time apart, Kaitlin and I are putting on backpacks on again and returning to something that has always felt very much like us: going somewhere without entirely knowing what the road is going to give us. This time, that road is the Camino de Santiago.
We’ll walk. We’ll undoubtedly get lost–mostly from my doing–despite there being literal arrows telling us where to go. We’ll meet strangers, collect stories, and most definitely complain about our feet. But most importantly, we will spend a lot of hours simply walking beside one another.
I’m beyond excited.
I’m not trying to escape what I’ve been working towards. Quite the opposite. If this season has taught me anything, it’s that I don’t particularly want to escape my life anymore. I just want to be a little more present for it.
Maybe that’s what this next chapter is really about. Slowing down a little. Walking instead of running. Spending some time with my wife. Spending some time with myself. And maybe seeing what happens when there is a little more room for the thoughts that have been quietly following me around for a while.
There are a few of those. Some scribbled down. Some still rattling around upstairs. Who knows. We’ll see. That’s the nice thing about sunrise. You don’t have to know exactly what the day is going to look like when the first bit of light appears. You just have to be willing to get up a meet it.
