A Million Miles

I just got back home from a one-week family vacation to Hawaii.
The last time we took a family vacation, I think I was 12, so it has been about 10 years.
The background is that my aunt moved to the Big Island over the summer for a new job and my mom decided that during spring break, we should all go down and visit and see hawaii. Hawaii!

I can't possibly sum up the week as a blog, other than stating that one week is not long enough to visit Hawaii. But I do have lots of things I've been thinking about.

First, time.
There is a 6 hour time difference between the East Coast and Hawaii. This means that our 11-hour plane ride there from new york was actually only 5 hours long. Subsequently, we left Hawaii at 8pm saturday night and arrived at our house more than 24 hours later.

But time is so much more than just the numbers on our clocks.
That week in Hawaii was a trip that stopped time.
Perhaps because of the jetlag, none of us could ever keep straight what day of the week it was.
By the time Friday rolled around and we were exploring Volcano National Park, Wednesday's coral reef snorkeling felt simultaneously  an instant and a year in the past. The Island is so diverse and varied, and we saw so much and did so many things that it all became a blur of the past. I have immediate, happy memories of this vacation.

And yet, this was a family vacation.
Every moment of it felt like I was 12 again.
School disappeared and it was just me and my brother sharing the backseat of a rental car while Mom and Dad carted us around to all the things we had to see. These memories became memories of a time that was literally 10 years ago, and may be 10 years into the future, as well.

I left hawaii absolutely dreading to have class tomorrow morning. Vacation should last forever. There are too many mountains to climb and too much lava to see.

This trip is also significant because I started and finished a book on the plane. Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years has been in my pile of books for a while and I figured I'd finally give it a go. And that book sure did speak to me.
It's significant because Don's point in the book is that we need to be using our lives to live stories, interesting ones. Hawaii is a story to me. But this trip isn't the whole thing. I feel as if that little (big) island started a chapter of a story in my life. I feel almost how people talk about feeling when they come home from missions trips, all bubbly about how such and such a country changed their life and everyone needs to go there to experience the wonderment. There is some sort of inexplicable pull and draw for me now. Like, now that I've been there, and spent a week trying to pronounce the names of places, and driven all over and shopped at their walmarts, that it is a familiar place to me. That I should want to visit any chance I get and be exited any time someone mentions the Big Island. The same way I feel about Troy, where I called home for 9 months and spent uncountable energy exploring and habitating.

But most of all, it drops me off back here, at UNH, with 2 months left before I have the great and sincere privilege of beginning a life so expectedly boring that I am honestly quite frightened about it.
Don reminded me that I never really wanted a boring and regular desk job, but has left me asking myself what I could possibly expect myself to do about it.

Don also has me thinking that I need to start recording my memories, so that I can't forget them and so that I can figure out the story of where I've been.