Tomorrow afternoon I fly to the U.S.¹

It's a very surreal feeling to be returning. There's so much I'm looking forward to; people and places, food and fellowship, the coffee shop where I used to stop by every morning on my way to work downtown, mom's blueberry pie, road trips and radio broadcasts of the Red Sox on cool summer evenings.

But even in four weeks - which is how long I'll be sojourning stateside - I'll only have time for little tastes of favorite things. A slice of that pie, a coffee with that friend, a visit to that church, an evening around that table with those people. Tastes which will delight, but also leave me wishing for more.

Such is life.


That being said, I'm very thankful for even those small tastes. It's an enormous privilege to be able to travel, especially across the distances which I've had, and will have, the chance to traverse.² I don't want to take it for granted. It used to be that you could only cross an ocean once in your lifetime, and even that crossing was uncertain to end in success.

Now, I complain if my seat isn't comfortable enough, or if there aren't any movies showing on my personal entertainment system that I want to see.


Aside from giving you new experiences to enjoy, travel also serves the purpose of helping you to appreciate your past. Where you've been, what you've done, who you were with. It's often the absence of those things that gives you opportunity to fully embrace the depth of what they were and what they meant.

The author and poet T. S. Eliot describes it as such:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning" ³

Or as Joni Mitchell put it, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone"⁴


In a reverse take on this principle, one of the reasons I'm looking forward to being in the U.S. is that I won't be in Latvia. Not because I'm desperate to get away - if anything, as much as I'm looking forward to being back in the U.S.,  I'm slightly reticent to leave - but because I know that my time away will help me to realize just how much this place has come to mean to me in the time that I've been here


I love Latvia.
I love America.
I can't be in both at the same time.

But I am thankful that I have the opportunity to stay connected to both places, both groups of people, and all that they mean to me. It tugs at the corners of my soul to be constantly caught between two places, but that tension brings with it a deeper appreciation for everything that I've been blessed with.


And for that, I'm thankful.



¹Thankfully, this trip was planned, unlike last year's, when I was compelled to leave on very short notice due to my failure to procure a residence permit in a timely manner. Hard to believe all that was transpiring just a year ago!
²According to my records, I've logged something north of 150,000 miles over the past two years. Crazy.
³From Four Quartets; Little Gidding
⁴Contrary to popular perception, this song wasn't written by Counting Crows, only covered by them. I just found that out myself. Thanks, Google.



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