I’m traveling to Portugal for a few weeks this summer, and just about every day someone asks me, with a big smile, “Are you excited about your trip?”

I must confess that I am not–excited, I mean.  I am preparing for the trip, I am glad for the opportunity, I am thankful that I have the resources of time and money.  But “excited” has too much of the anticipatory, too much heaviness of expectation, laden upon it.  I have learned that no experience–whether it is one that I seek or one that I fear– is ever what I imagine it to be.  And my idea of what that experience should be, or could be, or might be, will often prevent my awareness, in the moment, of the experience itself.

As a minister, I deal with life and death matters–and not just theoretically, in words, from the pulpit.  Just a few weeks ago, a man greeted me warmly as he has done for years, when he left the sanctuary after the Sunday service.  A week later he was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.  A week after that, he was dead.  Just today I learned of the recurrence of a breast cancer in one of my congregants, a young woman; yesterday she had a double mastectomy. 

I am aware that we are here on this earth by grace, every day, and every day is to be cherished.  I wake thankful in the morning, and I fall at last to sleep, when I can no longer hold my eyes open at night, thankful still.  My parents are long dead, and as of a couple of years ago, so are all my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family.  I am the matriarch now, the one protecting the younger ones, holding back death until it is their turn.

And so I try to live neither in anticipation nor in fear, knowing that when I slip into either, I am missing the very moment I am living.  And because these moments are limited for all of us living creatures, I don’t want to miss a single one. 

Portugal?  It will be what it will be.  My part is to go with my eyes wide open.