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But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When I’m in a new place, I don’t know what’s next, even if I’ve read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I can’t know a smell until I’ve smelled it. I can’t know the feeling of a New York street until I’ve walked it. I can’t feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can’t understand the humility of walking beneath those giant buildings. I can’t smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness.
This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in. This kind of attention is natural to a child. To an adult, it must be chosen. The trick is: knowing when we are in fact adults, and when attention is asleep. My
The factor that I overlooked was the finiteness of time. This concept is invisible to a child. Kids may know logically that they will one day be old, but they can’t feel it. It sounds like a rumor.
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.
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.
It’s remarkable how normal moments live on in the middle of chaos and tragedy. People still play chess and drink tea in the middle of war. New inside jokes are born at funerals.
“Monarch butterflies born in the fall are different than all the other monarchs. They are a super generation. They can live up to eight months as they travel from Canada all the way down to our forest. Then, after waiting out winter here, they’ll head up to warmer places like Louisiana and breed. Their children will live for only six weeks. It can take five generations of their children, who live so much shorter lives, to get back to Canada. Then those born at the beginning of fall, they become the super ones again. Then those ones begin the great journey. They can fly from Michigan all the
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“Be ever at peace with your neighbors, ever at war with your vices, and let every year find you a better man,
Jordan’s story reminded me of the James Baldwin quote: “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.”
