Re-entry back into family after nearly a week away (and sometimes more...as will be the case for some hops I need to make including Europe) can be trying. Maybe it is just me and the uber-emotions that get crankin when I am away and when the triumphant return happens, life has been moving here too. I can't be naiive to that.

Sincerely...I hate travel. Despise it. When the plane is wheels up, on its way to my next destination, I look at my watch and will start calculating the hours before I get home. Rainman style. 86 hours 42 minutes and home. But ironically, being out in 'the world' is my strength. Speaking. Meeting. Eye-contacting. Arm waving. Connecting. Convincing. Converting.

It's my painful dichotomy. I have to suck it up.

But coming back home when the senses are on fire, my mind is on over-drive as I pull the car into the garage and shut off the engine and breath out. Home. Thankful the Triple 7 didn't lose a wing. Am I getting a cold? What meetings do I have this week? Can I get out on a date with my lady tomorrow? Should I even line up at the race in Somewhere, CO? Do I still have it? When will the cycles finally snap the rubber band?

When away, I am the fish that has been yanked out of the water and am sitting on the wooden seat of the fat man's canoe as I bake in the sun, scales drying, mouth pulsating....doing what it can to pull in oxygen. The pulling-into-the-garage-from-the-airport from these trips is my symbolic re-entry into the water. It takes me a few moments...OK, maybe a day some times....and then I come back to normalcy. I can breath again.

I can do this. I can balance. I can be there when I need to because you know my intent is good and my mission is to get home. Be home. Feel home. I can be precisely who I am and continue to try only because of your faith in me. Is it a hedge? God, I don't know. But it is authentic....even if it has no answers present to me, to us, at the moment. It is, what I speak of, a continued search for the next wave in our lives. No more scales baking in the sun. I need to be drinking oxygen.

Thanks for the photo, Brian. It spoke all of this to me.