To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

by Jedidiah Jenkins

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine.

The worst thing you can do is assume you know now what you’ll know then.

I knew it was not for nothing, but what, I didn’t know. I just knew it was somewhere in me, and I needed travel to shake it out. I needed to see different things to remind me what I was, in contrast to what I already knew. To see clearly what I had become.

Whenever I meet someone, even in the most passing way, my brain subconsciously analyzes their speech, their diction, their humor, their demeanor, looking for signals that fit into the preselected categories of “cool” and “like me.” For the most part, my brain automatically discards the vast majority of people as forgettable. But sometimes my recognition software triggers a message. “We found one!”

We were in that part of the valley where neither the mountain we came from nor the mountain we sought was visible, and the river fog made us feel like the valley is all there is, forever.

mysticism is when you don’t have intellectual certainty about stuff, but experientially you do believe in things, like beauty and mystery and the universe as a force for good.