We’re All Just Travelin’ Through

We have lost another truly great woman.

A hero. An inspiration. A woman who somehow felt familiar to millions of us, even though most of us never met her.

Dolly Parton has passed away, and gosh, this one hurts.

I have been thinking about why she meant so much to so many women.

Of course, there was the music. The humour. The hair. The rhinestones.

But I think it was also because Dolly never allowed herself to be reduced to just one thing.

She could be deeply rooted and endlessly curious.

Funny and profound.

Feminine and formidable.

Tenderhearted and incredibly shrewd.

She could write “Jolene,” build a business empire, give millions of books to children and still make a joke about her own boobs before anyone else had the chance.

She understood something women often forget.

We are allowed to contain multitudes.

We do not have to choose between being sensible and adventurous. Between loving home and wanting to see the world. Between caring deeply for our families and wanting experiences that belong only to us.

One of Dolly’s most famous pieces of advice was:

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

But perhaps the difficult part is not finding out who we are.

Perhaps it is remembering that the answer is still allowed to change.

By the time we reach our forties, fifties and sixties, we have usually become very good at our lives.

We know what needs doing. We know who depends on us. We know where the extra batteries are, who needs a birthday card and what time everyone’s flight lands.

There is comfort in being competent.

But there can also be a strange moment when you look around at the life you have carefully built and wonder:

When did everything become so predictable?

When was the last time I surprised myself?

When was the last time I went somewhere simply because I wanted to know what was there?

Dolly wrote a beautiful song called “Travelin’ Thru.”

It is not really a song about vacations. It is about the much larger journey of trying to understand who we are, where we belong and how the pieces of our lives fit together.

And isn’t that what we are all doing?

We are all travelin’ through.

Through different versions of ourselves.

Through marriages, motherhood, careers, grief, reinvention, empty nests, new beginnings and plans that did not unfold the way we expected.

Travel gives us a rare opportunity to meet ourselves somewhere outside the familiar.

Not the self who automatically unloads the dishwasher.

Not the self who has already driven that road a thousand times.

Not the self whose days are organized around appointments, errands and what everyone else needs.

A different self.

The woman who dances badly in a place where no one knows her.

The woman who tastes something without asking what is in it first.

The woman who gets into the safari vehicle before sunrise, walks into the souk, climbs onto the boat or sits down for dinner with nine women she had never met before.

The woman who realizes she is more adaptable than she thought.

More curious than she remembered.

And much funnier when she is not thinking about the laundry.

This is why I do not believe travel is merely an escape from real life.

It is real life.

It is time spent fully awake inside your own days.

And yet I hear the same reasons for waiting all the time.

My husband does not want to go.

None of my friends can afford it right now.

Work is too busy.

My children might need me.

I am nervous about coming alone.

Maybe next year.

All completely understandable.

But Dolly had another wonderful piece of advice:

“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”

You do not need someone else to want the same experience before you are allowed to want it.

You do not need your best friend’s schedule, your partner’s enthusiasm and the entire family calendar to align perfectly.

Sometimes you simply need to decide that your curiosity matters too.

Most of the women who join me arrive alone.

They worry about who they will sit with at dinner. Whether they will fit in. Whether everyone else will already know one another.

Then something lovely happens.

They stop being the woman who came alone and simply become part of the group.

They laugh. They connect. They look after one another. They collect stories that will be retold for years.

And somewhere along the road, they discover that they were never waiting for the right person to travel with.

They were waiting to believe they could go anyway.

Losing Dolly is a painful reminder that even the brightest lives have an ending.

But what she did with hers was extraordinary.

She stayed connected to her roots without allowing them to limit the size of her world. She kept creating, learning, laughing, giving and adding new chapters.

Perhaps that is the lesson she leaves us.

You can love the life you have and still want to see what else is out there.

You can be grateful for home and still feel called toward the horizon.

You can know yourself well and still leave room to be surprised by who you are becoming.

We are all just travelin’ through.

Let’s make sure we are paying attention while we do it.

With grit, grace and a few extra rhinestones,

Penny