on returning

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”― Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

sigh. there’s a hell of a lot to say about THE END. it’s goddamn strange to sleep in 52 beds in 82 nights (a statistic i’ve clearly been fascinated with) in 12 different countries. it’s all very difficult to assess. now that i’m here i feel very foreign to the guy who sat on that slow boat in laos. i can only try get a bird’s eye view:

something about this type of travel has a way of putting the mind on what is right there, even though frequent decisions must be made about next moves. before i left i knew that there is no autopilot on the road. how could there be? you don’t know any of the turns. ever. so if i could just pay attention enough i would see it. in a more true sense than just “that is a building that is a road.” i mean see it. and when you only have a day or two in a town it is astonishingly easy to miss it, at least for me. i can spend millennia lost in my own shit. 

the right there. it’s always there. 

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“Only lonesomeness allows one to experience this sort of radical singularity, one’s greatest dignity and privilege. Understanding this permits one to understand the sacred poetry in strangeness, silence and otherness.” — My Western Roots, Marilynne Robinson

how many rooms in just three short months did i get that radical singularity? what a blessing life is. what a lucky fucking guy. i will never have a palace, i will always have this. 

a month or so after i returned from my trip i found myself in the minneapolis-st.paul airport en route to a wedding in denver. the enthusiastic banter seeping out of an airport bar and a hurried couple speedwalking to their gate served as a sort of tying down the veins to my travel junky ass. i was going for a long weekend. i wanted it to magically turn into a one-way affair. i wanted open-endedness again. my adrenaline started to creep up and immediately all my senses sharpened. i smelt saw heard more. my foot took to tapping. the hair on my neck stood. i began once more to dream of being out there. 

at the start all you need to know is that someone has done it before and you have to think that you are not consequentially stupider than them. if they can do it, i can. this is easy to prove. after that you’re just out there. and out there you meet people who go places and realize every day more and more that places are built to be gotten to. it is this simple. any sloth is internal. a choice, in the end. 

you must be this tall to get on the ride, and you are.

grading one’s self on anything is psychopath behavior. but since i was the only one there i have to give it a shot. i think any claims that i have been forever changed would be hogwash. they usually are. wherever you go, there YOU are. i think also i’d be selling a basket of lies if i said that everything was better THERE, across the fence, and as soon as i come back across it that all drops. 

it ended up amounting to a fairly persistent experience of a certain mental state, and that experience is helpful to remember even at times, maybe mostly at times, when i cannot still access that mental state moving forward. it’s like what steve jobs said about psychedelic experience, “LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin…and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it.”

it struck me that why i had felt healthier in the head a lot of the time when i was gone had nothing to do with nutrition or sleep. i ate so many bags of chips and roadside food and tossed and turned while other hostel dwellers snored it couldn’t be the case. 

the practice. the daily practice. the constant challenging of my attention. that was all real. and all good. even when it was stressful. for a few months i was sharper about the fact that all of life is just a succession of nows, and i grabbed onto more of those nows than i typically am capable of. there was somewhere to put this bundle of energy i’ve been wrestling for the last three and a half decades.

i do not think the type of travel i’ve just done is the only way to practice this. a very wise friend told me once that when he started having kids he realized he had to learn to be a tourist in his own city. i would suggest what he was getting at was mostly to do with attention. to actually look at and listen to and hear the long series of nows that make up a life instead of being caught in autopilot.

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