Mornings Are Tough
When he was my age, my friend and mentor Gary spent a year and a half traveling the world, celebrating his 34th birthday in Katmandu. It was a "time no object, money no object" sort of travelling, a more or less unfettered wandering through places and situations exotic and banal. But, he told me, about two months in, he crashed hard: is this what I want to be doing? Just one experience after another? Depressed and lost, he ended up at a Buddhist monastery somewhere in Southeast Asia, there to recover his direction and renew himself.
Virginia is a bit short on Buddhist monasteries, which may or may not be unfortunate...I'm not entirely sure how much I'd benefit from sitting still, when it seems to be in my nature to vibrate at a high rate of speed. But I'm quite certain I would benefit from the resultant "letting go," because the farther I get in time and space from my life that was, the more I can feel the cords that connect me to that life stretching and pulling, becoming painful.
This is about more than just my relationship with Pea...the pain I'm talking about is a kind of clinging-by-the-fingertips to the old comforts, the old ways of doing things, the security that came with a roof over my head, a regular income, a shower with multiple bars of soap, a grocery store within driving distance, a couch in front of the television, blankets, and on and on. The more I hang on to all of the things that I have chosen to separate myself from, the worse the yearning and discomfort becomes.
Foolish, yes?
But I've never claimed I wasn't a fool. Or, I might've adopted a certain...attitude, from time to time, but there is a certain measure of foolish lunacy to this endeavor that can't be denied. Then again, that lunacy is defined by the same criteria which make my hanging on to the comfortable things of the past a perfectly rational response...but when the "rational response" results in unhappiness, how "rational" can it actually be? Does it make any sense at all to seek out unhappiness?
Of course not, and that's not why I'm out here. I'm thinking, now, that this anxious sense of strained attachment, this long, bungie-like webbing that is now nearly 1,000 miles and three weeks long, is of a piece with the same sticky anxiety that has plagued me, it seems, throughout my entire life. A refusal to allow what is in the past to remain there, so that there is a constant tugging on my heart and soul that causes my chest to fill with heavy dread, a fluttering, nervous pulse that could only temporarily be salved with alcohol, drugs, or some other distraction.
Thus: I am always restrained, bound, tied to the past. My progress through life becomes slow and tortured, rather than a movement of ease and grace.
Over the last two or three months, as the final sale of the house became more of a reality - demonstrated by the packing of things into boxes, and the increasing number of "last time I'll do this" experiences - I would awake in the mornings in a near-panic. My eyes would flash open, and my heart would pound, and I would think, "Oh God, I'm awake again," as the escape of sleep fled and receded.
That still happens...I awake and stare at the white nylon of my tent roof and breathe in the chilly morning air, thinking, "What am I doing?"
But I suspect that I do know what I'm doing: I'm forcing the issue. The part of me that listens for the voices in the wind has managed to put me in a place where I can hear more clearly, if I will allow it.
Now, it's time to pack up and pedal away from this place, to another place.
