Beyond our Familiar

“It was like uprooting a giant oak tree!” – Sue Cook

Beyond our Familiar

Her call came last night.  It was about two things.  First, her long trek from the Pacific Northwest to the Ohio Valley.  And second, it was about the huge task, mostly mental and emotional, of moving.

“It was like uprooting a giant oak tree!”  Sue Cook explained.

Sue’s is an apt description of what it means to be filled with human nature and how being human affects any movement beyond one’s familiar.  Let her words become a vivid picture.

Visualize a California Live Oak, for example.  It stands seemingly aloof, spread from many others of its kind.  Yet, it has familiarity with its environment and other oak trees where it stands.  If you were to stand underneath such a tree and look straight up its trunk, you’d see branches and forks pushing up and around all of its sides until the branches become smaller toward their end where they are adorned, decorated, by beautiful leaves.  The leaves are high up. You can’t touch them unless you climb the tree.  It’s huge!

If you question its size, picture yourself on the ground, standing at the base of the trunk.  Then, wrap your arms around it.  See if you can touch your own left and right fingers together.  If the tree is old, when that tree has been in place for perhaps one-hundred or more years, most people will be unable to reach all the way around its circumference. With your visualized arms around the tree, see yourself exercising all of your strength and try to uproot the tree up!  

That’s what it often feels like, when we humans attempt to contemplate what it would take to leave the familiar.  To extract our roots.  Yet, that’s what Sue and Paul Cook have done!  They’ve asked and answered two important questions.  Questions you and I might choose to contemplate.

Their first important question they asked themselves was, “What do we have to believe?”  And, the second is like it.  What if this works?  

These are the same two questions asked, on the very same day by Justin Agers and Susan Monroe.

Justin explained, “I told the guys I work with where we were going.  They just gave me a confused stare and then said, ‘who’d want to go there?’.  It made me kind of nervous, but now that I’m here I can tell they’ve never been here before.  Otherwise they’d never say that.” 

Susan followed with, “It will be just us coming.  I have two grown daughters and they’ll be staying where we live now.  They just can’t grasp living with the possibilities of, ‘what if this works?’”

Are you and I obligated to believe what everyone around us trusts and imagines?  Are we to put aside our inner stirrings of wanting and hoping for something better and more than our current familiar?  Could we temper our fears and insecurities by giving ourselves hope and promise by asking that second great question again and again?

So, what if this works?  What is the upside if I have the courage to leave the familiar behind?

“It was like uprooting a giant oak tree!”  Sue Cook explained over the telephone.  But Sue, Paul, Justin and Susan have done it, so perhaps you can I can gain internal conviction to do so by asking ourselves those same two questions.  

If we ask sincerely, with full purpose of heart, then we’ll find and enjoy our own, new inner-conviction and knowledge.  Knowledge that while we won’t likely have success every time we venture away from the familiar, our attempts to do so will be worth it.  Because, there is that one move.  The right move, when we’ll be able to sit back and think of how far we’ve come.  Because, we will have been rewarded with a life which is wildly better than what was our once-familiar and beyond what we ever imagined we could have hoped for.