Traveling

Traveling is the action or activity of going from one place to another, typically over a distance of some length.

In basketball, traveling is the action of taking more than the allowed number of steps (typically two) while holding the ball without dribbling it, treated as a violation, and leads to a turnover, or loss of possession.

This past month of March was full, as it always is, of both definitions of traveling. There is frantic, almost maddening movement. The momentum of the spring season rushes through the environment. Migration brings new life and a fresh spirit of new opportunities. Spring breakers experience adventures through their travels. Teams within both men’s and women’s college basketball come together to compete to see who can travel all the way through the championship brackets!

For our neighbors experiencing homelessness, there remains the constant traveling from one encampment site to the next. Almost weekly, if not daily. A continuous, maddening, never-ending cycle of movement without any momentum or foreseeable opportunities to escape the shuffle. A deep desire stirs within them to have their next travel be the one where they’re moving inside into an apartment, into a new life. But instead, with each trespassing violation, another travel ensues, and with the accumulation of several extra steps, there are inevitable turnovers and losses of possessions. After so many losses through so many travels, morale is lowered, feelings of defeat set in, and any essence of continuing to compete in the culture of competition is lost.

For us at the ROC, we must keep traveling! We have to keep migrating to spaces where our neighbors experiencing homelessness end up landing! We must keep gaining momentum and grabbing hold of whatever fresh and new opportunities either currently exist or ones that we can influence to be created! The movement can’t stop. We have to keep putting in the miles to keep taking those extra steps! We are seeing so many others becoming distracted, halted, going backwards, moving away, or even completely stalling out and giving up! Not us! We are rocking and rolling and looking to knock and turn over whoever we bump into next into the movement and momentum we have going! We are bound for North, East, South, West, and anywhere in between, and we are loaded up and trucking! We’re going to do what they say can’t be done because we have already traveled a long way, and we have taken a long time to get there!