I’m sitting in the airport in Portland, Oregon.

It’s about 11 p.m. on a Sunday night. It’s been sunny here for the last few days, but tonight the clouds are forming and rain is on its way.

In the Pacific Northwest, the light is giving way to the grey. Some people are drifting into the area, at this gate, waiting for the plane. It isn’t supposed to take off for another couple of hours.

How come I always get to places too early? I like to arrive at a movie early enough to get the seats right in the middle, not too far back, just close enough to fill my perspective with the screen and to put my ears where the resonance converges. Going to the movies is a total experience, and I tend to lose myself in the sight and the sound; I like the story to batter my body and rip open my heart.

Some people are sleeping under jackets and coats. One couple is lying in each other’s arms, spread out across several chairs, with their jackets over their heads.

It looks rather romantic but uncomfortable — the kind of thing young people are willing to do and older people smile at with nostalgia.

Some people are working diligently, lost inside the worlds on their computers. They don’t seem to sense what’s gong on around them, but they are completely absorbed in what’s going inside that rectangle screen.

I just came from a family reunion and memorial service for my mother. I had never really met my brother’s daughter, and my own children, now all grown, had no memory of him.

I had not seen him myself in several years. I kept staring at him, letting him soak into my eyes and back into my heart.

I remembered when we had gone on our hitchhiking adventure from Northern California to Denver, Colorado in the middle of winter, and how we had ended up going over the Rockies in a car with no heater, ice forming on the inside of the windows and crystals from our breath floating in the air.

I remembered walking with him all day through the Navaho Reservation, and then getting a ride all the way back up the California coast for the last leg of that trip in the back of a windy pick-up truck.

He still has long hair, tied behind, and his eyes sparkle. He still plays guitar, tuned in open G, and a banjo.

I just came from dinner out with two of my grown children. We went to a restaurant in the neighbourhood where my daughter lives. As we walked in, I recognised a friend from a church I attended when I lived in Portland, and I drifted past his table.

When he saw me, he jumped up with an excited smile and hugged me. We talked for a few minutes.

We had met in a small, neighbourhood group that discussed our relative journeys in the world as those trying to follow Jesus. He had been working at Starbucks when he began to notice the children of patrons and began reading to them dramatically. My friend is a natural actor, so pretty soon crowds of children were gathering at Starbucks just to be entertained by him, and parents were coming and bring their kids for the combination of coffee and Jason.

When I rejoined my own two children, both now very much grown up and on their own this world as young adults, my daughter said, “It’s really sad when I go out to dinner with my dad, and he knows someone from my own neighbourhood!”

I just came from a taxi ride with a driver, a man about 30 years old who was planning his next exploit — a motorcycle ride through Central America. Does he speak Spanish? No. Somehow, that didn’t matter; it did not limit his imagination and his eagerness to have an adventure.

People on the move, going places and doing things. People engaged in life. The airports are full of them.

I know some people who hang back, timid with living. They find the safest route, the least risk. They conserve themselves. They are concerned with damage control instead of experience enlargement.

Instead of a big and fascinating world of possibilities, they see danger and potential loss all over the place.

They care; they love just like others who are more adventurous, and they want everything from life that other people do, but they have not yet learned to tolerate the apprehension of possible peril.

The trick is not to save bits and pieces of oneself in life, but to spend oneself completely, investing in what yields a profit in matters that matter most.