“Unsettled weather.”
During our time in Colorado the forecast kept calling for “unsettled weather”. I’d never heard that forecast in our home state of Michigan.
I had to look it up.
Weather.gov says unsettled weather is:
A colloquial term used to describe a condition in the atmosphere conducive to precipitation. This term typically is associated with the passage of surface or upper level low pressure systems, fronts or other phenomenon when precipitation expected.Weather.gov
But really?
It’s a word weather forecasters use to throw up their hands and say “anything can happen”.
In Colorado I’d joke that on unsettled days we’d just have “all the weathers”. The sun would come out, then a 10-minute armageddon of wind and rain, back to sun for an hour and hey how about some snow now just because you haven’t seen that for at least an hour.
Unsettled.
If you remove weather from the equation, Dictionary.com’s #2 definition of unsettled is:
Continuously moving or changing; not situated in one placeDictionary.com
Miriam-Webster.com defines it as:
Feeling nervous, upset, or worried : not comfortable.Miriam-Webster.com
This is often us while on the road.
Unsettled about being unsettled.
Suburban Dance
Suburban life felt like a square dance with a caller:
Allemande Left - time for kids to go back to school.
Promenade - put your Christmas decorations up.
Do Sa Do - fertilize your lawn.
Everyone else knows the calls. Friends and family move from one season to another with the confidence of experienced dancers hooking arms to change partners.
Not us.
We’re unsettled.
No Route
We don’t always have a route planned. We don’t always know where we’ll spend the next summer. Or winter. We don’t know what our post-kids life will be like.
We’ve been here before.
And you’d think we’d learn.
After over six years on the road you’d think we’d be more comfortable with the unknown. But we still worry. We still get anxious.
But a Goal
I have to stop and remember.
I have to remember that I didn’t like knowing the script. I didn’t like following the crowd. Moving predictably from one season to the next, doing the same thing every year.
I wanted adventure.
There’s little adventure in being “settled”.