Reading Francis

Why go back?

Maybe this is weird; I get the sense, from the questions friends ask, that maybe it is. 

We live in this phenomenal world in which there are more breathtaking places to explore than a modern Marco Polo could ever visit. We live in a city with more new restaurants than you could ever enjoy. Heck, we have four grocery stores and a produce market we could walk to, offering a wider variety of foods than my parents could ever have imagined, while recipes abound to use all this exotic food. 

But April and I go back to the same place when we travel. We frequent the same restaurants and coffee shops. We spend our off days repeating the things we did last time. We even eat the same foods. 

I don’t want to tell you when either of us last changed breakfast cereals. 

Why do we go back?

OK, so it’s true that we are introverts in extroverted jobs who are chronically exhausted. So we are not looking for a lot of stimulation in our down time. 

And it’s true that we have a tendency to tap into the community of people who work and live in the places where we hang out. When we don’t show up, people miss us and we miss them. So there’s that. 

But, honestly? I think it’s this:

Life has a way of separating us from ourselves. 

The swirl of things distracts us from who we really are and sucks us into the dramas of the day. In the midst of the daily controversies and crises, or the diversions and distractions, it gets really easy sometimes to lose ourselves in the current, get swept up in the tide. 

I often counsel people who are thinking about retirement to focus on what they’re running towards, and not just what they’re running from. But in some regards I am a big ole hypocrite on that front. 

We go to the same place on retreat, or the same restaurant on a date, because we’re not looking for adventure. We’re not running towards anything, really. We’re looking to reconnect with ourselves and each other. When you already know what you want to order, you have more bandwidth to tap into what’s going on in your beloved’s soul. 

Those little communities we tap into, they ground us, too. “Cheers” stayed on the air so long in part because, even in the 80’s, people longed for a place where “everybody knows your name.” Now? Heck. 

Even when it’s just a barista who remembers that you asked about her when she got hurt or a server who knows you care about his goofy hobbies enough that he brings April flowers on Mother’s Day, having people who know you as “those people” or “that couple” grounds you, in the craziness of the world, reminds you that that’s who you really are. 

Why do we go back?

Whether it’s to the Umbrian hill-town on the other side of the ocean or to Mass at the Church our daughter was baptized in, it’s not to be entertained or distracted. We’re not interested in “discovering” something new. It’s to be retethered to the better versions of ourselves that we too easily forget. 

It turns out that there’s a lot of power in the “re”. Would you rather discover a new frontier or brunch spot of recipe, or rediscover yourself?