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

by Jedidiah Jenkins

I read that when Tolstoy was young he wrote in his journal, “I am twenty-four years old and I have still done nothing…I am sure it’s not for nothing that I have been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past eight years. But what am I destined for? Only time will tell.” I was thirty years old reading this, sitting by a river in Mexico, wondering what I had done with my life. I knew it wasn’t for nothing that I’d been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past twenty years. I had dipped so deeply and completely into my faith, into my love of God, or who I made God to be, and what the people around me said He must think about everything. 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.