I was once asked to say something I was exceptionally good at, one refined skill I had crafted that most people could not do as well. Some might say writing and others might say treating illness and others might say running a company and still others scrapbooking. Arguably not all skills are created equal, but I found it a fair question to ask because it offers another pivotal chance to be real with ourselves. Life provides plenty of opportunities to lie -- to say that a wasteful television program is only a television program, and that we all die of something so smoking is nothing -- and we can usually get away with it. Unavoidable questions that force a splendid moment of silence have a way of exposing it all in a flash.
I decided then my skill would be adaptation. It's a vague skill, yes, but it's the only way I am able to explain going from Spain to France to Germany and all the other little realities of my life with constant ease, feeling very much at home in all of them. That was the essence of my last few weeks, exiting Spain to the French Riviera, cuddling up with a dreamlike Argentine girl in Montpellier, hiking quiet green World War II battlegrounds on the German border, looking down upon poor Anne Boelyn's jail before her beheading, kissing a beautiful Italian under Big Ben to the sound of the Thames, and other seemingly chaotic impossible moments that happened as simply as they did.
Landing in the United States after so much time away is always a peculiar feeling, and the silence then exists regardless of noise or commotion. Yet it was easier after leaving Spain in all its finality, its entirety, and I was ready to get the next part of life moving. Perhaps the skill is not adaptation but leaving -- the art of leaving, we'll say -- being ready, flexible, aching, excited, anxious, willing always for what comes next.
