Today is our 285th day of continuous travel.

Tomorrow we fly to California for a couple weeks before heading down to Central and South America.

And I am feeling melancholic. I am grieving for an ending that has not yet come. I am already sad for missing long hours of my daughters’ days when they return to “normal” school and “real life.”

I am experiencing anticipatory grief for the end of our 13 months of family travel around the world.
This ending, just 126 days away.

I’m not ready for the end of “Our World Edventure!”

In our “normal life” at home in California, we have always been so busy…too busy.

Too busy for long conversations over a steaming cup of tea. Too chaotic to invite and welcome friends into our home, or, to be more honest, deeply into our lives.

Over scheduled. Over tired. Spread too thin across our commitments to too many really good causes and opportunities.

As we rushed from one scheduled activity to the next, we were short on time; short on patience; short in our answers to one another.

Our relationships suffered. Our home suffered. Our peace of mind suffered. Our family suffered.

But it was our “normal,” our “real life,” the consequences of our choices.

This year of world travel that we planned several years ago has truly become “sacred” in the most basic sense: “Set apart from the everyday, from the profane, from the mundane.”

We have had all day and all night every day and every night for experiencing the world together as a family.

Together we have sought after learning in the most global sense. We have seen, touched, tasted, questioned, compared, assessed, analyzed, catalogued.

We have heard stories from history we have previously learned and thought we may have understood. But those stories sounded very different and had different conclusions.

We learned it matters deeply to hear stories from the voices of the people who lived it or from their descendants.

That culture dramatically shapes the story that is told. And culture intrinsically informs the ways those stories are concluded or are distilled for meaning.

I have watched my daughter’s faces as they have encountered the world. Witnessed them experiencing, learning, synthesizing, and comprehending.

I want to continue exploring the world with my family for the rest of our lives. I want to see more parts of more countries; to witness more world cultures through their arts and foods; to make friends throughout the world.

I want my daughters to understand themselves as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven; citizens of the global family; and citizens of the United States. And I hope they prioritize their sense of citizenship in that order.

Frankly, I don’t want “Our World Edventure” to ever end as a family. And I am certainly not yet ready for this sacred year to be over.

Nicole