The Odyssey

Having driven over 3,800 miles in the past couple of weeks with my family and Joel, the dog, I can, with confidence, report that there's nothing like a road trip to put things back together.

As the miles ticked by, hours passed like minutes, and as each day wore on, the chaos that became the inside of the Honda slowly overtook us. The rising tide of granola bar wrappers, Pringles cans, pillows, blankets, and books (7-11's don't stock Lotus flowers) signaled the inevitability of the approaching dusk and we began our nightly search for accommodation and renewal. 

Must Eat. 

Must Sleep. 

Must Reorganize.

Each morning we'd put things back in order and head on down the road toward another adventure. Over time, as we climbed hills and crested mountains, the winding roads that crept up steep grades finally gave way to the interminably, impossibly straight interstate that is I-40. Along the way, we remembered how to be together again. Having no choice but to interact with one another and to figure things out, we communicated; we "made common" our ideas and our hopes. 

In normal life, we're saddled with distractions that make it difficult to remember where and why we go where we go. But when all the doors are shut and we're moving down the road together, we have no choice but to cohere and deal with each other. We came together as a family during (and in) our Odyssey as we traversed the northern plains and mountains; our trajectories, at least for awhile, were in alignment.

To sustain this as a family and in our work at Casady, we have to keep putting things in order. Our community is incredibly complex and diverse. When we take time to address this complexity and converge on the big questions that frame us, we learn how to be a place where we do good work and serve our students well. 

We must pay attention to each other and take time to reshuffle and find a place for our things, otherwise our true destination gets obscured and overshadowed by various and disconnected endpoints. Although it's trite, the destination isn't where you stop, it's how you get there.

Summer is always a time to recharge and rebalance priorities, and while schedules tend to become less structured and busy, our capacity for divergence remains. This summer has reminded me that divergence without convergence leads to chaos, and that we must strive to find the right balance - to commit to the process of living in order that we might live with and for one another in the best ways possible.

So, as we packed our belongings and headed out for the final stretch home, and just as I was basking in the warm glow of family and togetherness, a troublesome blinking light flashed on and off indicating 'a potential issue with your transmission'. The next seven hours were an exercise in trust - not blind trust, but a hopefulness associated with the understanding that difficulty and chaos may lurk just beyond the next mile-post.

We made it home without incident, but it certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't take a look under the hood...

Goes with the territory, don't you think?