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February 20 - February 23, 2022
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.
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.
The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life. Thirty years old. I was now an adult, with or without my consent, and adults are responsible for their lives. I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be.
I looked back on my twenties and realized that every time there was a crossroads, I took the first and safest path. I did just what was expected of me, or what I needed to do to escape pain or confusion. I was reactive. I didn’t feel like an autonomous soul. I felt like a pinball.
When you don’t know what to do, you travel. You go out and see. You have to rattle the bed, shake yourself out.
I wanted to start my thirties like I started life: wide awake. I didn’t have kids. I didn’t have a mortgage. I felt like this was my last chance to crawl into the driver’s seat of my life.
I wanted to impress them, though if you’d asked me then, I wouldn’t have known that. It was buried too deep for me to see.
By thirty, I had learned a valuable lesson: You are not an idiot. It’s okay if you don’t know everything. Don’t pretend. Ask all the questions you want. It’s fine if you’re not prepared for the zombie apocalypse at all times.
I’m just going to post what I would post if I were talking to my friends in mixed company. That’s effortless and still me.
For me, thoughts and emotions stay cloudy until I put them into words, give them bodies to walk around in and be their own thing. That’s when they become knowable.
Each of us has a mash-up of talents and experiences and potential that plants something in us, and becomes a dream. A dream of being a creative, or an executive, or a father. A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren’t right, we try another. It isn’t a
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Sitting there watching Alejandro studying my markup like it was holy scripture made me wonder, what moral weight does being the beneficiary of my dominant culture place on my shoulders?
I lay there thinking back through my life—how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.
Meetings” and “dates” and “days of the week” used to mean so much to me. They were necessary frames for my life, for the passing of time. Now I never knew what day it was. My alarm was the sun.
I remembered my own piano lessons as a kid, and how begrudgingly I practiced for fifteen minutes a day, with my mother watching me like a hawk to make sure I didn’t sneak off to watch TV or eat BBQ potato chips. How inconvenienced I was in my roomy house with so many entertaining distractions. And here was this boy, a lover of music, using the free music lessons posted by some random person in Ohio to learn to play on his busted-up Casio, in the middle of a desert town with one paved road.
Maybe a twenty-one-year-old could take this trip and explore the world without worrying about what’s happening without him at home. But by thirty, I had built a life good enough to miss.
This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be free. Out here. Living the dream at thirty. And for what? To be uncomfortable? Well. You got that. But who cares? What are you really here for?
(This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all. Straight people, finding the world designed to suit them, don’t need to explore its meaning in quite the same way. But gay people don’t have that luxury. We must study it, dissect it, reject it, or reshape it. We do this with the thing that was rejected: our heart.)
Humans want few things more than to belong. And nothing unites people like a common enemy.
Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive.
His name was Diego, and the name of his shop, El Tercer Lugar, translated as the Third Place. “You know the saying? The three places. The first place is your home,” Diego told us. “The second place is your work. The third place is where you go by choice. Where you meet friends. Hang out. We want this to be that third place.”
“Jed, there’s always someone that goes first. Maybe God wants you to be that person in your community.
I wonder how many millions of relationships are alive because of this, avoiding conversations.
I thought I would be sad, hearing him describe these places I had missed. But I wasn’t. If anything, I was sad I couldn’t brag about having been there.
I was embarrassed that it felt so good. It soothed an old wound. My thirteen-year-old brain had made a note, “You are not an athlete, and athletes are what you should be.” I grew up and never threw out that note. I became funny and charming and accomplished, and I collected all kinds of notes. But beneath those piles of paper, the original note remained. “You are not an athlete, and an athlete is what you should be.”
He had left his job to travel and see the world and celebrate it.
The universe will provide, but it’ll cost you your pride.
“I think you’re really just a kind guy, trapped in a tradition,” he continued. “You’re gay and you’re out and free but you were raised a certain way and you won’t let go of it.
“What I mean by coward is that, Jed, I think you know that your beliefs are old and archaic and meaningless in the modern world. I think you think that you know that, and have reasoned and rationalized faith so you don’t have to be controversial, don’t have to upset your family, or your mom, or whatever. I think your sexuality caused you to go extra on your faith, to be a good boy. You’d be a super Christian in order to overcompensate. You’d prove that being gay wasn’t perverted. You’d prove it was reasonable and something good boys do. I think you are wearing the costume, hiding from
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I didn’t know what I was holding on to. I had wrapped my life in the fear of messing up.
How different our lives were. She did not live in the world of the Internet, of push notifications and endless crises, of social media and texting and passive-aggressive e-mails and life in the modern age. She lived in a shanty on the side of a mountain, all alone with her few animals. I wondered if she was happy. I wondered if she thought about happiness and how to get it, the way Americans do.
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.
Maybe that’s what I was rejecting now. Certainty. But that’s what faith is—believing without certainty. Yet I had been raised to assume otherwise.
I was alone now and happy to be alone. Which, for Mr. Social Jedidiah, sounds odd. But it exposes a different side of me. Traveling alone, you get to be whoever you want. I don’t mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can’t leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you’ve broken hearts, the new place doesn’t know. If you’ve lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn’t know. If everyone thinks you love Jesus, but you never really have figured out what you believe, the new place
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I was sick and tired of all the poverty. I felt bad for the thousands of souls that lived in mud. But the charm wore off, and I knew I could bike away and enjoy my good fortune of being born white in the world’s richest country. I still don’t know what to do with all that. The hardened soul of reality, dividing rich from poor like it does.
Life can feel effortless, like you’re carried along by an unseen force. Or it can feel like you’re in a losing fistfight with a brick wall. It all depends on which way you’re headed.
I couldn’t put a finger on it, but I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meanings.
So, as an exercise in mindfulness, and because I believe gratitude is the door to joy, I am going to list some of the things I’m thankful for:
I love talking to the road and to trees and birds. My voice keeps me company.
I had wanted my spirit quest to answer questions for me. More than that, I needed it to reveal my questions to me, then answer them. What a burden to put on travel, which in itself is ignorant and indifferent. It becomes so hard to just enjoy the thing as it happens. We make the journey about arrival, not travel. We are so goal focused. We are the dog that won’t stop paddling as long as he sees the shore. But, man, my shore had been hidden by the fog for so long.
I wanted to change. I wanted to be born different. To be replaced and born again. New. Forgotten and remade. I don’t know how that happens. I guess you have to completely erase your past, which I wasn’t ready to do. So I carried it with me, no matter how hard I ran from it.
