This is the (new) experiment - remembering the travels that loom large in memory, but whose (public) documentation is spare and exists (primarily) in the schism between image and written word.
This is not beside the point.
It may be the main point.
Let's begin...
The Australia trip represents many beginnings: sidecar learns to (consistently) walk, my yin obtains a (Melbourne) library card, and I start to navigate the (sometimes) choppy waters where personal and professional ambitions converge.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that it looks like puffs at the airport on day 398 and buying groceries with (unremembered, yet documented) friends on day 400 and the balcony on day 401 and at the Melbourne Zoo on day 412 and a visit from Grandma on day 418 and a train ride to Karunda on day 431 and hanging on Four Mile Beach in Port Douglas on day 432 and hiking in the rainforest in Daintree National Park on day 434 and visiting Erskine Falls on the Great Ocean Road on day 437 before finally coming home and crashing out on day 440.
Looking back on these images, though, I realize that the most accessible memories of those six weeks are not necessarily the ones that found their way to this venue. For instance, this was the soundtrack to our time in far north Queensland:
and although listening to this song in an otherwise nondescript grocery store parking lot is one of my most salient recollections, there are no images, only the emotion of being on a great adventure on a continent that I never expected to visit, the first of numerous work-subsidized vacations that transpired from 2014-2019. This sense of excitement and gratitude imbued our entire time in Australia, even the mundane 10-minute walk from our apartment in Southbank to the office each day, where we got to experience the wonderful autumn weather during months previously known only as spring.
Other items exist as pure recall - nearly sterile, like facts memorized before a quiz. These bookends exist to anchor the experience, like sidecar being unable to walk when we left Florida but fully ambulatory when we returned. While this fact is omnipresent, the feeling of what it was like to watch this new phase of independence emerge is largely absent, even though moments like these seem like they should be etched into memory:
As does this one, which (based upon the dimensions and filter) appears to have been posted on Instagram and evokes a playfulness during our last days as we drove along the The Great Ocean Road:
stopping along the way for my yin to feed raw strips of meat to kookaburra at some roadside farmer's market:
But, when I pause to remember what that drive was like, the first things that come to mind are sidecar (who detested car rides as an infant and toddler) crying in the back seat and my yin attempting to nurse her to sleep, and reminding myself to stay on the left of approaching cars at night as we wound our way back eastward towards Melbourne for our final night in Australia.
At some point in early parenthood, amongst the deluge of advisory cliches, someone told me:
the days
last forever
the years
fly by
and the wisdom of this statement has only become more pronounced with the passage of time.
Parenthood, more than any other experience thus far, sits at the intersection of ineffable joy and the unrelenting, sleep-deprived grind of tending to the needs of another. In doing so, an entirely new identity emerges, one that (at least for me) establishes itself as primary at a dizzying pace that comes to inform all others. The bond to one's romantic partner, previously dissolvable, becomes permanent through the act of parenting; one's own parents, once superhuman, morph into aging grandparents; and one's professional identity and aspirations become inseparable from providing for one's family.
With this change comes a disorienting loss of self, or at least the reassessment of previous musings, and core beliefs, and musings masquerading as core beliefs that - while still meaningful - are unavoidably diminished in the face of parenthood:
and reveal themselves to be largely superficial when (re)encountered on the painted panels of a campervan:
These roadside reminders are proof that our heroes - literary, artistic, spiritual, religious, historical, whatever - do not belong to us. Any "special" knowledge or relationship we think we have is actually a form of hubris or selfishness or both, and we are best served to heed poet philosophers from the (not too distant) past:
Kill You Idols
And this is why parenthood has been a teacher without compare.
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