The further I've gotten away from emotional repression - through transition, through sobriety, through presence, through vulnerability - the longer my emotional timeline has become. I used to experience myself in terms of what is happening right now and if that felt like anything other than peachy, it felt like a problem. I had many solutions for those problems, few of them healthy or ultimately productive. They were very effective at changing the feeling, but what they took away from me is the emotional process. I never got to the other side.
In fact I didn't really get anywhere, because I didn't start. There's no way to travel without spending time in motion. Without spending time between places. Without seeing the same thing in the next moment.
But as we travel the same roads more frequently, what used to look scary and unknown can become familiar. It doesn't mean we aren't still thrown a bit off our seat by the pot hole after the stone farmhouse before the fork - but when we expect it we can lean away from our companions so that we don't knock our heads together.
If we don't engage, we lose the opportunity to learn to be comfortable in motion. To learn that at the end of our journey there's a new place of rest. Perhaps one far more splendid for having known where we've come through.