Redrawing the Comfort Zone

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but mine was left in Tanzania. (Same number of syllables, so it fits nicely into the song)... I have been back from Africa for 4 days now, and I am having a problem being totally present in the Twin Cities. My body is here, but my mind and heart keep drifting back to my time on the mountain, in the towns, and on safari. The sights, the smells, the sounds (or total silence), envelope me whenever I close my eyes. I miss it so much already. See, I knew when I started this process, that the trip was going to change me. There was no way that it couldn't. I knew that my body would change, because of the training and the physical challenge of climbing that mountain. I knew that my brain would have to take on challenges that it never had, just to get me up to the summit and back down. I also knew that my heart would expand to take in all of the new things that I would experience. I just didn't realize how much it would alter m...

Okay, well, I guess this is really happening! I leave tomorrow for the first leg of my journey. I get to spend a day in New York, with dear friends, before heading off to Africa. WOW! It is always such a strange experience to have worked so hard for so long, in pursuit of a goal, and then to have it be right around the corner. On the one hand, it feels like it has been a very long time in coming, and I am so ready for my hard work to pay off. I am ready to stand on that summit and know that I earned every step of that journey. I am ready to celebrate the most challenging physical escapade that I have ever tackled. I am ready to experience a whole new country, its culture, and its beauty. But then there is the flip side of that. I have always found it so weird that I start to feel a little bit sad, like I will be losing something when I am no longer "in training" for a major event. The excitement of having it in the future, and seeing the interest on people's faces whe...