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.

But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what’s next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand.

But the big fancy adults preach the opposite as well. They say, “fall in line” and then, in the same breath, “think different, take risks!” We are told, “follow your passion” and “stay hungry,” at every commencement and graduation speech. This mixture of school and risk is the holy cocktail of American ideals, and for those rare beacons of exceptional success, it turns their life stories into fables. But for ordinary folks, it is a difficult road to walk. Be sensible, but be wild. Be ordered, but be free. Be responsible, but take risks.

The carefree timelessness of my youth was rattled in my twenties. A kind of panic set in. Time became visible. Each choice I made began to feel more and more final, as if every choice was the death of all the others. Millions of doors were locking behind me as I passed them in the hallway. I felt that age thirty—adulthood—was coming like winter. Am I missing out? Am I making the right decisions? Am I becoming the person I want to be? It often dawns too late that we have only one life, only one path, and the choices we make become the story line of our lives.

LOOKING BACK NOW, my discomfort with career and time and choices was the smoke of a deeper fire. An important part of me was covered and squirming. It had something to do with my faith. In doubts and questions. There were deep parts of me that were wounded by Christianity. There were also deep parts of me that loved Jesus and gave Him credit for everything good in my life. This created a tension. And because I was taught that salvation rested on belief, on saying the right words and believing

my soul was afraid of dying. Not simply from loss of salvation, but from loss of self.

I was holding tight to the narratives of my youth like treasure. But with hands full, I couldn’t receive anything new.

I like timeless things, old things. They’ve made it to the modern age and taken on a meaning larger than their intention. I wanted my journal to be like that.

I’m not sure any of us are at our best living in paradise.