This really crazy thing can happen when your 5th wheel tries to roll away without you. Twice.

It can really mess with your sense of stability. Go figure.

The first time it happened in Washington a few months ago while we were visiting the Burditt’s. We could see the slope that time, so we thought we understood it and learned from it.

(Side note: Just to illustrate the difference in my and my husband’s response time. When I saw Jazz moving backward without us, I froze, terrified. Justin? He jumped into action, reaching out and trying to stop it with his bare hands. Definitely the guy you want in a tight spot.)

But the second time it happened (about two months ago) there was no discernible slope. We were at a campground, in a level campsite and had just unhook the truck when it slid back off the two inch leveling blocks with a hard thud to the ground.

Oh, did I mention Zeb and our dog were inside when it happened? Nothing like a mama heart attack.

After that second time I sat outside the RV for hours, unable to go in, unable to unfix my gaze from the front jacks. As if my watchful vigilance was the only thing keeping us in one place.

But it was the dizziness that really messed me up.

Anytime we leveled the jacks, put the slides in or out, hooked up or unhooked, or… you know, made the slightest move, I’d get so dizzy as to almost fall over.

If you’ve been in a 5th wheel or any RV, you know there is always perceivable movement. Which means I was almost always dizzy.

And let me just say, it’s terrifying to feel every subtle movement. Every tiny wiggle, every creak, heaven forbid a freaking lurch…it’s heart-clenching and stomach-dropping and awful.

I knew when we made the choice to travel two years ago I would be confronting a sense of stability. A “sticks and bricks” house denotes at least a certain level of stability.

But I never experienced this ungrounded sense in Benny the Brave. Maybe it was having two axles to rest on instead of one, but I found it easier to lean into an inner sense of stability last year.

This year, though, you could call The Year of the Stretch.

I’ve been stretched and grown in ways that surpass all human comprehension and language. I feel as though I’ve been on a spiritual fast track as I experience the depths of the human condition and come out the other side in awe again and again.

But my inner stability has been the furthest stretch yet.

You see, I actually WANT this uncomfortable experience.

I want to learn how to deeper access my own sense of inner stability, to find a grounded peace within any storm, to walk on the steady ground of my own heart and Soul.

So since that horrific rolling away incident, I’ve leaned into grounding myself.

I’ve spent time barefoot in the grass and the sand, visualized my feet growing roots into the Earth, and I’ve considered piling rocks around Jazz’s wheels and jacks to reaffirm to the world that we are, in fact, grounded and not rolling anywhere.

I’ve also gently leaned into what I may start calling the Great Stretch.

I’ve done my own inner work, sought support from my own coaches, leaned into my own Source, and looked at and processed every element of my reaction and fear, from psychological to spiritual to physical and back again.

It’s as though I’m peeling back layers around this thing called stability, knowing it and its place in my life deeper and through the incident and my own response to it, understanding my own self deeper and with more compassion.

Thankfully the dizziness is rare now. And I’ve found there is a gift in sensing every small movement (lurkers don’t stand a chance).

But more than anything I’m thankfully to be finding my own rugged and unyielding sense of stability, not in my physical environment (although I now understand the importance of grounding our physical selves) but inside myself.

Because I know the world will always change outside of me. I know the unpredictable will continue to occur.

And I also know that it’s my own inner footing that keeps me truly unshakable.