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if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don’t know what’s under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child—why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns the patterns of living. Every second has value.
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My alarm was the sun.
This happens a lot with people who espouse idealism. We want to feel better about our mediocrity, so we look for the holes.
“Be ever at peace with your neighbors, ever at war with your vices, and let every year find you a better man, that’s ol’ Benjy Franklin!” he said, and cheersed his beer, splashing it high.
“Ever at war with your vices.” It didn’t say “let each year have you conquering a new vice.” No. It wasn’t about winning. It was about fighting. Continuing the project of improvement.
“I think that life is a pilgrimage. “My life is something like a small boat in the middle of an ocean driven by the weather and the tide. All I carry is faith. “I dream, I search, I love, I live.”
Even after all this time, The Sun never says to the Earth, you owe me, look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole world.
Then she would say “goodbye.” I knew she meant “good night.” But I loved that she ended the day with such unintentional intensity.
She seemed to love him without needing him.
