After reading Patti Clark’s book, “Recovery Road Trip: Finding Purpose and Connection on the Journey Home“, I finally felt like someone really understood me. The deep illustration of a midlife woman’s road trip across the country to “recover herself” after her estranged father passed away was a profound exploration of a major transition in one’s life. She touches the human heart with integrity, authenticity, and vulnerability in a way that by the end of the book, you feel like you have a new best friend.
In the early pages, we learn that Meg has been sober for several years, but she has hit a wall in her recovery. Life is feeling purposeless, stale, and “the shimmer has gone, and life is hard.” We know she is a seeker, but she acknowledges feeling alone, fearful, confused, and full of a complex form of grief. Coping with the death of an estranged parent, looking at regrets and loss of her own parenting experience and grieving aspects of her unresolved history, she makes the decision to take a road trip. An old friend sets her on her journey in Meg’s inherited old mustang to discover the lost aspects of herself,” the parts I had shut down and dismissed.” She is craving connection, intimacy, healing, joy, and a new sense of meaning in this next stage of life.
At each stop from Montana to Colorado to Wisconsin to Boston, she is reliving childhood memories as well as healing the pain from the past. In each beautiful oasis, we are introduced to unique characters at meetings she attends, or coffee shops she enters, or libraries she explores-all dropping some nugget of wisdom to embrace and integrate into her new life. She asks each precious soul what they believe the meaning of life is. At the end of the winding road across the country, she has put together a list of eight words that will guide her future self. After one “coincidence” after another, the Universe confirms to her that she has found her answer.
In a final conclusion, she quotes Tara Brach, “Our most fundamental sense of well-being is derived from the conscious experience of belonging. When we feel part of a whole, connected to our bodies, to each other, and the living earth, there is a sense of inherent rightness, of being wakeful and in love.” Her final analysis is that the true opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, its’ connection. To be connected to others is our biggest gift. She writes of the “trance of separation” – feeling not good enough, when the truth is…all humans experience this feeling, it is what helps us to feel a part of.
In the second half of the book, she offers readers an opportunity for self-discovery through wonderful writing/journal exercises. We question our own resistances, our purpose, our discomfort with the unknown and we visualize a brighter future. She walks us through it with grace, kindness, compassion and a gentle hand with the comfort that she walked this path before us.
As her trip winds down in Boston, we turn to this twelve-week journaling and expressive writing course, outlined to help us visualize and create our own new life and heal parts of ourselves we have dismissed. From practicing self-compassion and forgiveness to creating Intention and gratitude to exploring our creativity, we do our own exercises in healing and discovery. We are guided on our own journey to connect more with ourselves and others so we can now “walk one another home,” as Ram Daas so famously said. I rode this journey with the author to rediscover myself, and I will be forever grateful.
#QUITLIT Sobees Score: 4 out of 5 Sobees
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