Driving in the dark

Author Annie Lamott says that writing a book is like driving at night. You know your destination, you can picture it in your mind, but all you see is the stretch of road that falls under the beam of your headlights. So you have to keep rolling forward, confident in a destination you can’t see, concentrating on what lies immediately in front of you. You go forward slowly. Your journey at any given moment is a length of thirty feet, forty feet tops. That’s where the writer’s work is done, right out front, in the headlights.

Being in transition also is like driving at night, I think, except the destination is undetermined. You don’t know what it looks like and can’t picture it because you’ve never been. You know you’re headed somewhere, but that’s all you know. So, you worry about the climate, or if the people will be nice, or if you’ll be happy once you arrive. And you worry that you’ll forget the route back, you’ll never again see your old friends, never again see the house in which you were raised. You’ll begin to think that old adage about never being able to go home again might just be true.

I have a friend who seems troubled by a transition that threatens stability, which he defines as “knowing where my home is.” I’ve had another woman tell me recently that “home is where your mother is.” Transition guru William Bridges says as people move toward the autumn of their lives, their transition is an effort to regain the “inner home.” I presume he’s really saying transition is our clumsy attempt to get our arms around the spirit that dwells within us. All of these perspectives on home are worth pondering.

I have another friend who lost her father to Alzheimer’s disease; her family’s experience is included in the anthology Voices of Alzheimer’s. She tells me people with Alzheimer’s universally express a desire to “go home.” I find it fascinating that when all else is dissipating in their minds, Alzheimer’s patients fixate on “home” as a destination they believe will give them respite from the ravages of their disease. Peace. I guess home, as a concept, is one deeply embedded in our tissue.

Of course, home can be where you came from, where you are, or a place you’ll find at the end of a long journey; it just depends upon where you happen to be along life’s highway. My favorite thought on "home," however, comes from a Virginia-based folk singer: “Home is where my heart’s at rest.”