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

by Jedidiah Jenkins

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.

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.

I needed movement.

I didn’t know it would pry my fingers from the parts of myself that had to go. I was holding tight to the narratives of my youth like treasure. But with hands full, I couldn’t receive anything new. And I couldn’t see that I was clutching both treasure and poison.

If you need to hitchhike, hitchhike. It’s your trip, not anyone else’s. If you try to be too fanatical about it, you’ll spend more time stressing out and less time seeing a place for what it is.”

He believed nothing was more powerful than example.

The start of a big journey makes every detail feel monumental.

“When you clip in, you will fall. Several times,” Collin said. “So just expect it. That way it won’t hurt your pride when it happens. Everyone falls.”

Riding a bicycle gives the land a realistic scale.

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.

home of a person we’d have never known. 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.

This happens a lot with people who espouse idealism. We want to feel better about our mediocrity, so we look for the holes.

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.)

but damn, the adventure wears off, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m not ready to quit right now or anything. But it feels good to admit it isn’t one long string of euphoria.”

Humanity fixates on violence. We’re fascinated by its abnormality; we want to understand it and learn how to avoid it. But the truth lies somewhere in between blood and peace. Most of us will move through life without experiencing the abnormalities of violence, but that doesn’t mean those abnormalities don’t exist.

Human beings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive.

He was tasting his city through the eyes of a newcomer, seeing it fresh again, glowing with an ambassador’s pride.

I don’t think that the universe loves me, and calling it the universe leaves it open to mystery and implies how big and unknowable it is.”

You don’t love God, man. You love feeling like you belong to something.

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

If I had been beautiful, would I have thrown off these Christian rules long ago?

How can you enjoy the day if you’re dismantling the world and the people around you piece by corrupted piece?

Jesus saves. But you gotta accept Him real quick or He kills.

I just kind of got free from the assumption that life has to be reconciled to this book. That is only a reality because people say it is. I want my reality to be reality, and then test things against it.”

I am a Christian, but how many beliefs can I strip away before I am not anymore?

And maybe I think it’s simply man’s search for God, documented.

I wasn’t ready for the finality of saying “I am not a Christian.” It felt too certain. Maybe that’s what I was rejecting now. Certainty. But that’s what faith is—believing without certainty.

Jesus doesn’t want you lukewarm, preachers said. Be all in or all out. Stay away from the middle place, the gray.

I have felt a bigger hug from the universe by rejecting the obsession to call it something. To name it.

!

And quitting that limited idea, that the truth is so small, has given me deeper curiosity in the universe, my world, and the people around me. I love them more. I love everything more. Because I don’t see anyone else as right or wrong, we all just are.

Did I believe Jesus was my savior? I didn’t know. I had when I started this trip. And I think I still did. But not in the same way. In some larger way.

feeling like your past isn’t a vice to hold you in place can be very freeing.

why don’t God’s eyes burn me like human eyes do? I think it’s because I’ve always felt that He understood me. He made me. What could surprise Him?

“It’s just the truth. The U.S. runs the world through coercion, through fake news stories, through control. Everyone knows this that’s outside of the U.S.

It’s so famous, to do the U.S. road trip. One day I will. I want to see the empire before it falls.”

I was entering the final month of my journey, and no one was watching. Which, though lonely, felt poetically personal and perfect.

If I, being in a category of oppression, could still mock another who is laterally the same as me, then how common must that hypocrisy be? And in being that way, they are not intentionally evil or bigoted, but groupish human beings wired to question difference.

Exposure to human stories reminds us that we’re all human.

Of course, goals help us get a lot done. But they often remove our attention from the experience to the achievement.

had been reborn into a different life, a different normal.

I think it is a good feeling. The fear of God.

?

She had kept on hiking, at her own pace, mostly alone, for all these miles.

“How was it, Mom? I’m sorry I didn’t wait and walk with you. I should have.” “No, honey, this was your trip.” Her words came in quick, breathy spurts. “I’m here to support you. I’m glad you got to go and see it at the top. That’s what I wanted. I’m just so thankful to be out here, thankful for my walking sticks.”