Three Questions

Each morning I have to wait an hour after taking a prescribed medication before I can eat anything or – gulp! – even have coffee. What does anyone do with an hour like that? Nothing especially productive in my case. (Please don’t judge: I haven’t had coffee yet!) What I do manage to do is scroll my phone for tidbits of news and tips and even recipes. (I’m hungry!)

Often I come across some gems, one of which I pass on today.

It’s summer and I’ve traveled recently as, perhaps, have you, and I’m about to take a more extensive trip into totally unknown territory, and so I was enticed by a short article entitled “A Travel Writer Says You Can Turn Any Trip Into a Life-Changing Experience By Asking These 3 Questions” at the INC magazine site. Writer Jessica Stillman even promised: “You don’t have to trek halfway around the world to experience the life-changing benefits of travel.” She referenced some wisdom she had gained from a TED ideas blog post by renown author and world traveler, Pico Iyer, who affirmed that any travel – short or long or armchair – can alter your life “if you use it for reflection and learning.” In our Covid plagued world, that was particularly heartening news.

She and he ask us to ask three questions as we travel or when we return and think back on the journey:

1. What moved me most over the course of my trip?

2. What surprised me most on my trip?

3. How might my trip move me to think or live my life a little differently?

I’ll give some brief answers to the questions based on my latest trip to Lake Michigan to visit relatives in the northern part of that state although my answers don’t really matter. Only yours do. But the reflecting is so worthwhile.

I was most moved by going to a Night Sky Park set up by the lake. The only lights in or out were soft red, and we were all given red cellophane tape to put over our phones. Sitting on our chairs or lying on blankets, we watched the sky slowly darkening and individual stars slowly bowing in until at last it was pitch dark everywhere except for the sky now ablaze with numbing numbers of stars. I had never seen the Milky Way so clearly, not only its cloudy trail but the thousands – millions? billions? of stars embedded in that dust. Occasionally, satellites zoomed aloft and even the space station. Otherwise, there was just the proverbial twinkling. 

I was most surprised by, instead of feeling so minute and insignificance in light (literally) of all this magnificence and majesty so far away in time and place, feeling very much a part of it all – as large and as important – not out of arrogance (or serious delusion!) but thanks to my recent and growing awareness of our integral place in nature, not above or below, but with.

A lofty sky brought about lofty thoughts about how to live my life a little differently. I am grounded in this bit of earth that surrounds me daily, and I appreciate its solidity, material presence, small wonders, and challenges to do and be better at caring for it. But I am uplifted by the transcendent, the whole so much greater than the sum of its parts, that the star-bedazzled night revealed. I – we – can be uplifted because we are one of its parts; we help make up the whole, and, thus, we can bedazzle, too.

In these days in which the actions or inactions of humankind can so discourage me or, even worse, defeat me, I think I need to remember that insight and live my life differently. I can see myself as part of that which hurts, harms, and destroys and I can change, and/or I can see myself as part of that which inspires awe, wonder, and an infinity of hope, and, once again, I can change.

My witness here, for women’s equality and full and revered inclusion in a secularly and spiritually transformed Church, comes from both visions, but I suspect only the latter will ultimately prevail.

Pico Iyer’s final advice for our summer travel was this:

“Promise yourself 20 minutes every day to ensure that the journey doesn’t get lost. How might you act differently now? Ask yourself how your life is rich in ways you hadn’t imagined before [and] ask yourself how it’s poor.” 

I recommend we apply that advice not only to our summer journeys but to our journeys working to heal our wounded Church.