The theme of my life has sharpened recently. Since August, and the life- threating birth of Izzabelle, I have been more focused than ever on family.
It’s not that I didn’t place a priority on family before. No, not that. But it is that nearly losing people you love reminds you that the stuff of earth is just stuff – possessions, collections, even our jobs – it’s all stuff. Do we live to work or work to live?
Oh, I love my job, or I wouldn’t be doing it. Teaching college is rewarding and challenging. Finding ways to “do it better” is part of the chess-match-like characteristic that has drawn me to occupations like coaching and teaching. My students are a source of frustration and joy, a source of failures and successes, a source of predictability and surprise. And, they teach me, even as I teach them. So I love do love teaching. But teaching is what I do. It’s my work to live.
I could easily bury myself in the office at school and in on-campus activities and find myself spending 10-hour days there. I love attending the college’s athletic events, being involved in college student life activities, and seeing my students in their enterprises outside of the classroom, whether that be athletics, plays, competitions, etc. And part of that is the result of my own educational philosophy, their more than students and I want to both know them as more than students and to have them know me as more than a professor.
But despite this desire, I have been reminded many times this past 6 months that I won’t get back the time with my wife and kids. Wil is nearly 4, McKinley almost 3, and Izzabelle hits 1 in August. These are important times, and greatly to be valued.
My students cannot fully understand this, as they are not parents themselves (at least most of them). But the day will come when they are a parent, and I hope, that they will have learned from me, both in the classroom and outside, that I will have modeled for and mentored them in both their academic discipline and in life. I do believe that education shouldn’t solely be about educating the mind. It shouldn’t only be about an academic discipline. It should be about other things as well, like citizenship, morality, altruism, faith.
Over the last few months, when I didn’t have to be at school, I have really emphasized our family spending time together. We’ve worked in as many outings as we can (sometimes at the sacrifice of household chores – i.e., let’s go to the zoo, the laundry will be there when we get back).
Recently, we had the opportunity to head to my in-laws in Tampa. Melodia and the kids usually spend a month there every year. Mostly, it has been in May/June. But this year, we decided to do it sooner. I think winter hit us especially hard this year, and we were all much in need of more sun.
Melodia and I both love to travel, and we’ve often talked about traveling to a place being as much about the journey getting there, as being there. Yeah, we can hop a quick flight, but sometimes, we just need a journey. So we sought that journey out recently.
About 6 years ago, Amtrak was selling tickets on ebay as a promotional thing. They did it about 6 months, and I bought a few because they went so cheap. I paid $40 for a roundtrip train ticket from Cleveland, OH to Los Angeles, CA – 5 days on the train, in total. What an adventure that was! A solo trip out to Cali while I was in grad school at Ohio State. The train stops in Kingman, Arizona, the town my parents live in. So I was able to stopover and stay with them, before continuing on to LA. It was a wonderful journey. I have been longing for a few others, including taking the Empire Builder across the northern United States.
Another route I had been wanting to ride since I first learned about it in 1996, was the Auto Train. Boarding just outside Washington DC in Lorton, Virginia, the Auto Train runs non-stop (with your vehicle on the train) to Sanford, FL (just outside Orlando). 
Melodia and I decided that this next trip to Flordia was just the time to try out the Auto Train. So for Easter Break, we loaded the kids into the Jeep and drove to the Auto Train station seven and a half hours away. There, our Jeep was loaded onto the train, and the kids experienced the first real train ride of their life.
We booked to small 2-person occupancy rooms side by side, so that we could have a place, besides the typical coach seat, to sit, watch the scenary, and to sleep at night. The rooms were an awesome adventure for our little ones. The whole train itself was an inquistive journey for them, but if the train ride were the cake, the rooms were the icing. Oh, how the kids loved playing in their rooms, running back and forth between “Mami’s room” and “Papi’s room” on the train.
The 17 hours of that train ride, in retrospect, went by too fast. But they wetted our appetite for more train travel. I only wish Amtrak were more affordable, and that our country were more like Europe in regards to rail travel. But I expect that we will again soon find ourselves on a train. Afterall, I still want to ride that Empire Builder. And I’d like to ride the Coast Starlight as well.
Like I said, it’s about the journey, not the destination… yes, that’s a blatant metaphor for life.
I began this post by talking about family. In the last post, I’d written about Wil, my son. What I wanted to communicate in this is a simple reminder, one that I am increasingly living these days… the importance of family, the importance of savoring our journey, and the importance of, at times, forgetting our earthly destinations.
Yes, there is a prize on which our eye should kept, a destination that we are striving for beyond this earthly realm. But while we are here, it’s about the journey. I know those who look at this life as a series of destinations. But I just don’t see it that way. It’s about a series of journeys. And it’s about one journey.
Lately, I’ve been reminded that we weren’t built to journey alone. And as a dad and husband, I’ve been reminded that I have a responsibility to aid and join the journey of 4 others in my life. And I’ve been reminded that we don’t always shoulder our responsibilities as we should. We sometimes set those down for a while, maybe taking for granted that they’ll be there when we return from soloing. But perhaps we all shouldn’t be soloing as much as we do.
I have many other responsibilities these days beyond teaching. I coach volleyball. I sit on a board of directors. I do many things. Lately, I have been asking myself, am I doing too much? Am I soloing?
Our families our important. We don’t live alone. We have responsibilities. Whether we shoulder them or not, they are our responsibilities. And we will be held accountable for them. I believe that. My journey has been greatly enjoyable these last few months, and I pray it will continue to be so. But as with other things, that requires vigilence on my part. It requires me to reexamine my priorities, to limit my solo trips, to make sure that I am journeying alongside those who most need me on the journey.
Who most needs you on their journey? And are you journeying with them? This is what I’ve been thinking about.
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