If you are my Facebook friend and/or follow me on Twitter or have the pleasure of having hung out with me recently, you’d know that I’m in the middle of some sort of crisis. Not actually sure if you could dub it a true existential crisis, a freak out, quarter life craziness or what, but something is going on within me. I’ve since reached out to friends that I find to be wiser, more creative, have it more figured out than me, for advice. And what they’re telling me is and isn’t what I want to hear.

From what I’ve gathered this feeling never goes away. We never know what we’re put on earth to do, so we should just enjoy it, damnit. My friend/professor/fellow Bianchi lover said to me:

“The journey IS the destination. There is no “there” out there.”

SO true. In a figurative sense such as life and in a literal sense, like when you’re actually in the woods on a journey.

My run/hike today was a 9ish mile loop to a place we call 4-corners, (yep you guessed it, four roads meet up at the top of this ‘hill’) I went with one girl who is in great shape and another girl that hadn’t really every been on the trail in years, (I hope we didn’t scare her away.) Today was sunny, warm and the woods were clear and crisp. We took three hours to do our loop—it really shouldn’t take that long but we took our time, ran, walked, hiked, talked about why each of us live in Southern Oregon. We’re all in different points in our lives, moved for different reasons.

We got to the top, our destination, and really, 4-corners is rather anti-climatic. The view isn’t that great, there’s a big hole in the middle where water pools and it’s all muddy and gross, or frozen if it’s cold. We stretched, hydrated, chatted a bit more and then ventured back on the trail. The run down was FUN—kinda like a roller coaster for our feet only without the nausea and long lines of some lame theme park in Florida.

At one point we stopped and just looked at the setting sun beaming through trees. Winking a quick goodbye before lowering behind the mountain. We all took a mental snap shot and someone said “This is why we moved here girls, this.” This journey is just some thing we have to ride, enjoy and absorb I guess.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the race of moving to the top, being ‘successful’. But then that makes me question the definition of success—and that will be a whole other blog post. For now, I’m going to revel in my tiredness of a longer run, a good day with friends and feeling a bit calmer about my life because I have great people all over helping me from all corners.