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.

There’s no time to find what you love, you should be building your credit score. Take risks, but don’t be foolish. Believe in yourself, but only if you’ve proven you should. Haven’t you seen those idiots auditioning on American Idol, thinking they can sing? Don’t be one of them. Don’t embarrass yourself. Don’t waste time at a job you hate, but magically manifest money to leave that job and chase a dream. Got it? Perfect.

bowing to the shareholders, hating work and therefore buying things, a house and a nice car, and having kids and sending them to private school. Raising them to chase their dreams, and lying with my life. That frightened me.

The inconvenience of uprooting my life, of stepping away from all that I had built, was enormous.

I always thought I didn’t need comfort, but the trip had taught me that that’s something comfortable people say.

“It was really a matter between me and God. I would have to live the life he had made me to live. I told him quite a long, long time ago there would be two of us at the Mercy Seat. He would not be asking all the questions.”

I believe gratitude is the door to joy,

I wanted to leave my office life in order to feel time passing in some more holy way, holding it in my fingers and studying each minute like a prayer bead.

But by now I had slipped into my animal brain. I was looking from rock to rock, boulder to trail to hand-hold, focused only on what was before me. My hands are cold. Put them in your sleeves and don’t touch the rocks with your bare skin. Climb over this boulder. Put your right foot here. Breathe through your nose. This boulder is wobbly, step lightly and watch your ankles. It was meditative.

am frightened by the cliff, the ease with which I could lose my mind and jump.