On Your Journey This Year, Take a Look Around…

As a kid, looking out the window on a road trip moved me to my core. You know that feeling when you stare out into space, past the stars, like you’re looking into something magnificent and mostly unknowable? I felt that feeling staring out the window of our minivan into the wide open space of Texas while my parents drove us home, usually after a holiday visit to see their parents and siblings and our cousins. In the quiet of the car, the dark night outside the window, I could stare for hours, looking into the night at lights or no lights, wondering who was out there, feeling some kind of bigness that settled onto my heart like a hug.

Who was out there? People I’d never know living lives I’d never learn of.

Sometimes at night we’d pass some light that would stay close to the horizon for a minute or more passing from the forward edge of the car window to the back. I’d wonder what that light was. Maybe a house. Maybe a power plant. Maybe a barn full of horses… or llamas… or giraffes.

Now, on long road trips, I’m usually driving, taking care of kids, or napping. But occasionally, if the car doesn’t rock me to sleep, I still look out into the distance and let my mind wander over the curves and angles of the horizon. I let my mind take in the buildings and houses, and I think - There are people in there living their entire lives inside that very house. All the drama of their days, all the plans they make, all the barefoot walks to the bathroom at night, all the kissing, all the meals. All a delightful mystery to me.

In Armenia, I lived in Stepanavan, a town of about 10,000 people. I did all my work in villages outside Stepanavan, and we often drove hours one way to get to meetings or project kick offs or day long workshops. The farthest drive was over three hours one way, and I stared out the window like I used to as a kid.

I shared on Instagram a bit from my book about what it was like to make those drives. Here’s the passage with a bit more of what it was like to stare out into the countryside of Armenia.

The Armenian back roads are often full of potholes, sometimes so many that the car tilts violently side to side as we drive slowly over them. I bob like a camel rider, staring out the window at cleared fields or burned fields or fields of cabbage or fields of sunflowers.

Sometimes I try to imagine the lives in the homes we pass. I imagine moms and eldest daughters who must have pinned up the clothes I see waving in the wind from outdoor clotheslines. I imagine the men who visit the odd church off on the distant hills made of stone, empty of ceremony save the yellow candles with soft wax burning quickly, momentarily wafting with the prayers of those that lit them.

Sometimes there is no sign of humanity except that the barren hills which I know used to be forested, because most of the hills here were deeply forested before the devastation of the late eighties and early nineties when resources were beyond scarce and the trees had to fall so babies could be kept warm through awful winters. I look out at the hills and fields and imagine what it would be like to walk to the top of one and look at everything at once.

Thinking about the new year ahead, I want to capture more of that. I want to find time to stare out a window. I want to imagine the lives I’ve never known. I want to take time to be in wonder and to feel the soothing weight of it, knowing that I am one of the billions of lives lived at this moment on this sweet little planet.

As you start the new year, I’m sending you a wish, that you get time to take a look around on your journey around the sun and imagine all the possibilities, and then let them go as easily and peacefully as a view from a car window.