Untraceable Journeys
Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the untraceable journey each coin we touch has taken to reach us. This 1954 penny, for example. Lincoln’s face and the wheat stalks are worn thin from the touch of countless hands. During that penny’s long journey, how many lives has it passed through? Who’s spent or received it? How much of the world has it visited, and by what convoluted route? Will it soon be forgotten, or will it become rare enough in retrospect to be imbued with new value?
As an author, I’m aware that my books take equally untraceable journeys. These columns do too. My moments of celebration coalesce into stories, which become bytes and bits, which are transferred through invisible digital pathways to your computer, received in a landscape I can’t imagine, within a life I might not even know exists, with an effect I can’t guess. It’s a process of trust, to send all we create into the world, to let it find its invisible impact. Like children, our expressions begin lives of their own.
Other untraceable journeys are all around us, daily. Even people we know well have inner aspects and histories of which we’ll never be aware. Animals, both domestic and wild, have emotions and experiences we’ll never understand. Tiny insects, in their inscrutable lives, take long journeys on their own scale. The food in the grocery store takes an invisible journey to reach us, too. So do the realizations that have taken years to arrive inside us. Even the person it has taken us a lifetime to become can be a partial mystery to our own conscious selves.
Every once in awhile, a hidden journey becomes partly visible. I’ll hear from a stranger in a distant place, telling me how my words have inspired them. Or I’ll discover that a copy of one of my books has ended up in a place I never sent it. Recently, for example, I found a signed copy of my most recent book, Grateful by Nature, in a thrift store far from where it began, after a cherished friend and creative collaborator accidentally let it get away. Somehow it found its way across Oregon until it randomly returned to me, and I could return it to him. It reminded me of when my mother’s treasured painting of her own mother disappeared for several years, only to somehow reappear on an insurance agency’s wall, before being returned to me. (See “Marian Comes Home” on my website.)
It’s people more than items, whose untraceable journeys through my life I treasure most. I think of friends with whom my life has diverged, only to return across the course of the years. Most of all, I think of the woman I love beside me—for the second time, after our lives diverged but then merged once more, after over a decade apart. I marvel at our journeys.
I ponder this again while reuniting with the glimmer of the night sky, after weeks without star watching. Whether or not I notice, the starlight keeps arriving, itself only a surface glimpse of light’s journey through the universe. In some way we’ll never be able to fully perceive, there’s an underlying order to the stellar patterns, which we’re contained within.
It leaves me in wonder, and humbled. All we do and create may ripple across the world in ways we’ll never see, with more positive effect than we imagine, even after our lives have concluded. Yet we’re each nothing more than another single droplet that invisibly merges back into the greater waters of being. Not lost then, simply absorbed. Not meaningless, simply integral in much greater meaning. We’re each an essential part of the countless levels of life’s imperceptible meaning and depth.
All in all, we only perceive a trace of how beautiful our own world is, let alone the majesty of the entire universe, and whatever else may stretch infinitely beyond that. Even the thought of that takes an untraceable journey now, worth celebrating together a thousand times.