Traveller

‘Not all who wander are lost.’ (J.R.R. Tolkien)

I remember during my late teenage years when various friends started to ‘settle down’. They took on mortgages and started talking about things like, how to install an electric shower. I looked on silently in horror, completely bemused and dismayed that they could throw away their?lives and freedom?so easily. I noticed that, strangely, what gave them a sense of fulfilment and security had the opposite effect for me. Settle down felt like tied down. Too much security, paradoxically, left me feeling trapped, unsettled and insecure. I preferred to sing a song like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s iconic?Freebird.

Many years later now, I still find myself living in?transition. Far from being an interim state, it has proved to be a permanent state of impermanence. Even those people, relationships and situations that I have tried to?hold onto?have often nevertheless drifted away from me, sometimes torn away by decisions or circumstances that I could never have anticipated. As a?follower of Jesus, it’s a continual life lesson: ‘We are here as?travellers, not as settlers.’ I need to keep learning to look upstream, to who and what comes towards me, and not downstream, to who and what has already gone.