Growth & Adventure in the Waiting

This is the face of a girl (unsuccessfully) trying not to worry. I dropped the van off at a body shop outside of Austin on Monday. For those of you who are new here, to give you context, in 2021 I left behind a 12 year federal career, sold my house, bought a sprinter van, and had it converted into a micro-home on wheels. All of that took the entire year (you can read more about it in my previous blog posts), and in December, two days after I got it back from the builder, I was in a minor accident that somehow resulted in some pretty extensive damage. It took me two months to even get an appointment at a Mercedes-certified body shop.

I’m still waiting for an update, but I’ve thought a lot about it this week, and it brought me to this revelation:

The van is a vehicle for the growth and adventure I’ve been seeking, but it’s not the only vehicle. There’s never (or at least rarely) just one path to a destination.

There is so much growth and adventure to be had in the waiting. Also, I love to plan, and it’s certainly left me a lot of time for planning and other unexpected adventures.

During this waiting, I’ve taken up photography (with a real camera), which I’ve always wanted to do. I have so much to learn, but I’ve included a few of the photos I’ve taken so far. So far, my favorite subject has been the moon!

I’ve signed up for a mountaineering course, and I have big plans that will succeed that, to include my long-time aspiration of climbing Denali. While Denali is nothing like one of the 14 peaks, it is the tallest in North America and still requires a lot of planning and training. Expeditions won’t even take you if you don’t have basic mountaineering training and a few other peaks under your belt. The course isn’t until August, as the earlier ones were booked up, but it gives me time to train. The van really should be fixed by then, but if not, I’ll fly up (it’s in Washington state). After that, my plan is to climb Aconcagua in Argentina (the tallest peak in South America) in January 2023, and then shoot for Denali in summer 2023. There are a lot of external dependencies (the biggest being COVID and related travel restrictions), so this is certainly subject to change, but I have no doubt the goal itself will lead to great experiences. From there—who knows! I’d love for it to just be the beginning.

This, of course, takes money, so I’ve been growing my freelance writing and editing portfolio. My main projects so far have involved writing vacation rental listings (I find these to be very fun, and I love promoting these unique experiences), doing some writing and editing work for an intelligence interviewing consultancy founded by a good friend and former teammate; he created the award-winning intelligence interviewing training program that I program managed when we were both in the government, and I’m thrilled to be able to keep working with him. I also just started doing some work for a creative agency, and I’m excited to see where that goes.

Something else I’ve started brainstorming about and would love to accomplish this year is getting involved with or starting a charity focused on sustainability and conservation efforts. I’ve wanted to do this for at least a year, but I still have a lot of research to do to determine how to go about it and the best way I can support these important causes.

I’ve also been more consistent about writing creatively—mostly short-form/micro-poetry which you can find on my Instagram, but I’m hoping it will lead to writing longer form prose again. This is the passion I want to feed the most moving forward.

I’ll be taking a trip to Austin soon to get a tattoo I’m pretty excited about, and I got an Airbnb for a couple of days and will do a bit of exploring there. Despite growing up in Texas, I didn’t visit Austin much, so I’m pretty excited about that and I’m sure I’ll be documenting the trip here and on Instagram (but mostly Instagram).

What unexpected lessons or adventures have you had in your seasons of waiting?