"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 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'd done everything right. I'd spent my twenties going to college and law school and getting a job and being a good boy. But when I turned thirty, I quit my job and spent a year and a half bicycling from Oregon to Patagonia. It wasn't the job that chased me away, it was mortality."
"I would be stripped of what me feel safe to make room for something else."
"Let whatever money I have flow through 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."
"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."
"I've read that the San Diego-Tijuana border runs down the middle of the largest wealth gap in the world."
"Either way, my culture is the most dominant on the planet, and I benefit from that. 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?"
"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."
"I was homesick, but also leaning into the lessons I knew I wanted from this bicycle. I was unpacking the bags of my life, spreading the contents on the floor to have a look."
"As he talked, I would drift between good cheer and observation. This often happens to me when I'm listening to someone tell a story they've rehearsed a hundred times with a hundred different visitors. Their face is not astonished by their own words; they're not reading your face as they go, to tell if their sentences are landing. They're bored at the injustice of having to make their case again and again to a deaf universe."
"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."
"Human brings have little capacity for sustained horror. I think our minds need to play to survive. Permanently serious people always look so tired, maybe because they are fighting an emotional battle that eats the body alive. To laugh and play while the bombs drop is one way to survive a war, even to win it."
"And it would be here when I got back. Perhaps tweaked and slightly changed, but not transformed. It would be the thing I stepped away from. It would be the routine I could return to."
"The humidity that enveloped us felt so thick that I thought I could bite the air."
"You don't want to spin through space without a tether."
"What better place to destroy God than surrounded by His best handiwork? Or what better place to replace the white man's God with the god of nature?"
"Jesus had kept me from kissing a boy for twenty-eight years. Jesus had kept me from myself. I had thrown myself upon Him so that He might fulfill me. If He unraveled before me, or worse, vanished, what would I make of my youth?"
"I am a Christian, but how many beliefs can I strip away before I am not anymore? Do I believe the world is six thousand years old? No. Do I believe the Bible is the infallible word of God? Hmm, I think it's inspired, but open to interpretation."
"Maybe that's what I was rejecting now. Certainty. But that's what faith is - believing without certainty."
"I wanted to understand who lives and who dies, but I didn't. I just believed that I would always be okay. It was unshakable. Maybe some people just have that. Harry Devert certainly did, and he died. But I did, too, and I was still here."
"If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong? Is it about avoiding hurting others?"
"They keep Americans arguing over guns and black people so they won't look outside the country and see that the U.S. is an empire."
"I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew that my deepest wounds were the place of my deepest meaning. And she was ground zero. My salvation was somewhere inside her."
"An awareness of my own hypocrisy stung me. I hadn't noticed this in myself. And from this thought, it spread in me an empathy for my mom, for the people in my church. If I, being in a category of oppression, could still mock another who is literally the same as me, then how common must that hypocrisy be?"
"Exposure to human stories reminds us that we're all human. I mean real exposure. Listening, hearing. Not point from across the room. Engaging. And most of us are just trying to make it day by day without hurting anyone else."
"Everywhere, the wonders of Patagonia rose up around me, but by then, and with no one to exclaim to, I stopped exclaiming. I looked, and my eyes were happy. But I had no one to sing the praises of Creation to. Only the Creation itself."
"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."
"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."
"For the first time in my life, I felt that my only allegiance was to the truth. Not to tradition. Not to safety. Not to what I had been taught. But to whatever was true. And that made me feel strong."
No comments:
Post a Comment