You can’t experience grace until you’ve experienced yourself. –Paul Zahl

I have swum in a couple of oceans now, as well as a gulf and a few seas. I have lived on an island, in several states, and a couple of continents across two hemispheres. If finding myself were the goal, I have certainly been located by now. But it isn’t geographical wandering that has led to that discovery.

I have found myself, have learned myself, have known myself in the counselor’s chair, in the space between my children’s yelling and my exasperation, in the moments of deciding whether to pour another drink, in between the moves and the events. It’s the in between that is really everything.

I said yes to an invitation to join a team on a sixty-kilometre hike across Sydney in two months’ time, and my body is catching up with this decision and all it entails: early-morning alarms, chafed skin, blistered feet, aching muscles. And also: new friendships, unexpected strength, beach sunrises. I feel every step even as they all become a blur once the endpoint is reached, which is really just another starting line for the next outing.

The pain is intense and the views are incredible. This, I think, is life.

I don’t think I’d want to know the person I would have become if I’d gotten what I wanted, if I’d had the easy road: people who made excuses for me as easily as I made them for myself; parents who hired me a PR team rather than making me own my mistakes; marriage in my early twenties; a stationary existence. The flat path. Because it’s in the re-stationing, in the grappling that I have become and am becoming. Not the broad strokes or simple black and white, but the day-to-day: the blisters on feet and heart that come from messing up, from hangovers, from being forgiven, from coming up short and finding the enough elsewhere.

From learning how to breathe in a new way.

When The Husband and I visited before our move here, we drove by a car wash with a cafe attached. I could imagine the boys there: The Kid watching the cars move through their line, Little Brother beside him. Last weekend we sat in that spot, two years in, this car wash one of many landmarks now as familiar to them, to us, as any back where we were. These are the moments when knowing occurs: the moments between dirty and clean, which is to say, all of them.

On our most recent training hike we met in the dark and finished in the light. In those moments between dark and light, we walked and climbed and covered ground, and somehow this thing called sunrise, which is even assigned a definitive time down to the minute each day, it occurred while all that was happening. As if the sun isn’t always there shining, and we, the travelers, aren’t the ones moving, being brought closer to the light.