Setting out for Armenia

"When you set out for Ithaca
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of promise." ~Constantine P. Cavafy, "Ithaca"

My bags are sitting out in the hallway, packed and ready to go. I'm lying in bed, trying to relax before we begin the next few days of travel and absorbing the realization that this will be my last night in my own bed--in my own house--for three weeks. Not that I haven't spent much longer periods away from home before (it comes with the territory of being a college kid), but there is always a sort of gravity to the last night before you leave the country. You aren't just absorbing a last few hours of home and family and friends. You are absorbing a last few hours of everything that is familiar, before you find yourself in a place where nothing is. For me, at least, the last night before a departure is a sort of tradition.
We--the Mercer Service Scholars--are all coming to this trip to Armenia with different levels of travel experience. Some of us are counting down the hours till takeoff from the Chicago airport tomorrow night; some of us have a bit more trepidation about a first trip out of the country. But if our past three days have shown us anything, it is this: that we are all ready for the adventure, come what may.
I already know it's going to go by too fast. This kind of thing always does. But there's no harm in asking anyway for what Cavafy advises in his poem "Ithaca," and there's a trick to getting it, too. It's a lesson Indie and I learned last summer, on a different adventure, and it is this: be fully present. It's a hard lesson and as a busy culture, we're pretty bad at it: we're always looking back or looking forward and forgetting to look at where we are now. But when we're in Armenia it's going to be particularly important for us to be present, because we're going to want to remember. We're going to want to soak in every detail, and to be potent in our service, so we must pay attention to where we are and who we're with at every moment.
This is what I'm thinking of as I watch the clock wind down to this next beginning. This trip could fly by, as these trips are wont to do, and we could lose the minutes and the moments in the slipstream if we aren't careful. But if we stay present, despite everything that will tempt us to look back to what we've left or forward to our homecoming, we can make it last.
So, as we wait to begin our journey together, I ask that our way is long.