This is part 1 of a 2 part series.
We went on a week-long vacation every year as a child and every year, I begged to stay home. It’s not that the trips weren’t well intentioned — with four children born in an eight-year span, my mother planned them carefully, right down to the fried clams in Westerly RI and the historic merry go round in Cape Cod. But I never wanted to go. I simply preferred my own bed.
That preference has followed me through all 68 years of my life, which is part of why this spring and summer caught me a little off guard. Between a pilgrimage, a run of dance competitions, and two rare weeks away with my husband, it turned into one of the most travel-packed stretches I’ve had in years. I’m home now and still sorting through what the travel season taught me — though I think I’ve landed on it. It was never really about the places. It was about the people.
Three Trips, Three Purposes
The trips looked nothing like each other and each one taught me something different about what it means to experience intentional living after 50.
In spring, I traveled for a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, with the Order of Malta, accompanying adults and children who are seriously ill. It was physically demanding — long days on my feet, accompanying people whose bodies were failing them — and emotionally tiring. But what stays with me isn’t Lourdes itself, the grotto or the baths or any of it as a place. It’s the conversations. There’s something about that kind of intensity — everyone exhausted, everyone wanting nothing more than a decent meal and a chair, everyone’s heart already cracked open a little by the malades you’re caring for — that strips away the small talk entirely. Your guard comes down because you’re too tired to hold it up, and because you’re going through it together. The week was steeped in prayer; it found me in the pushing of voyagers, the waiting, the deep conversations had on the long walks to different churches and in the long lines. I came home physically tired and spiritually filled, and none of that filling had anything to do with geography.
Then came several dance competitions, continuing an art I’ve loved my entire life. There’s a different kind of journey in that — the discipline of practicing diligently for decades, staying available to whatever God wants to use me for at rehearsal or in performance in the slightly zany, sequined world of competitive ballroom. Here’s the thing about competitive ballroom that people don’t expect: we always find someone, or a small group of someones, to dance for — not just the judges, but real people in the audience we can bring some happiness to. I tend to look for someone older. At one competition this spring, there was a small cluster of them, watching from the side. So we danced for them. And they engaged right back — leaning in, smiling, following along. I blew the choreography twice because I was too busy trying to entertain them. That’s the fallout of relationship-building on a dance floor, I suppose — you lose a step or two, and you gain something better. It would be easy to call this the “fun” trip in contrast to Lourdes, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Both asked the same thing of me: show up fully, in the body I have, and be available for whatever might be asked of me.
And this summer, twelve days away with my husband — genuinely rare, since his work has him traveling constantly. There were many memorable moments in that time, but the one I’m still laughing about happened on the flight home.
Ken turned to me, pretty pleased with himself, and said he’d accomplished the two goals he’d quietly set for the trip:
Live in the moment. No full device break — his work doesn’t allow for it, but where he could, the phones stayed down. We limited conversation about our running list of “things we could worry about” and instead opened ourselves to the moment, to the people who slid briefly into our world, and to whatever felt new.
Show love. An intention so basic, and yet in the speed of ordinary life, it’s so easily set aside.
I let him revel in his accomplishment for a minute. A better person than me might not have made my next move, but the irony of it couldn’t be passed up because those were the exact two goals I had quietly set for myself, and I had to share that.
Different trips, different purposes — service, art, marriage — but underneath all of them, the same question kept surfacing: where am I finding God? This season, the answer showed up three different ways: in being with the sick, in an art I refuse to put down, and in making time for someone I love because life won’t hand it to us otherwise.
Here’s what I didn’t expect: the girl who begged to stay home never actually changed. Given a week at a resort with nothing but a beach and a view, I’d probably still ask to go home early. What changed is that these trips were never about the destination — they had people and purpose attached to them, and that, it turns out, is the thing my younger self was always missing. Attitudes don’t shift because we get older and suddenly develop a taste for travel. They shift when travel stops being about where you’re going and starts being about who you’re going for.
That’s what aging with purpose has looked like for me this season — not grand resolutions, but small, private intentions, offered again and again in whatever form the travel took.