eThoughts : More about Wanderlust

I celebrated my 25th birthday at the base of the Matterhorn that summer of 1972. I told no one and it was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had. It had been a journey to get there. I had eschewed a business, a marriage, and college. I knew that I needed to get out and away. That leaving began in earnest in the summer of 1970, though I had done a bit of wandering before that. It did not end until the summer of 1976 when I began fooling around in the landscaping business, which would occupy my economic world for the next 22+ years.

My wanderlust began quite accidentally by trying to figure out who I really was, sans the downloads of all the talking heads. That figuring began in the fall of 1966 when I dropped out of my second year of college. I was one huge disappointment to those talking heads—one really lost soul. However, I had been doing what I was supposed to do and it was not going well. Nonetheless, my sense of responsibility rather than my sense of who I really was at the time, would still rule until the fall of 1969. Then I saw my path clearly, though another round of people were hurt by my decisions. I knew they would be fine and I knew I wouldn’t if I stayed. So though it was an agonizing path getting the necessary clarity—and courage—I was gone. Well, I was gone after I worked for 9 months so I could have the money to get gone. I can live cheap, but I cannot live poor.

I read a lot in those nine months about philosophy and courage and hurting and identity and intimacy and attention and meaning, etc. Those musings finally led me to understand that people are people way before they are what our expectations try and make them. As a result of those musings, a lifelong battle with my parents ended—two weeks before my father passed away. About a month after his passing I was off.

Over the course of the next six years, I probably worked about fifty percent of the time, just enough to leave. During those six years, I lived out of a suitcase or backpack, even if I was staying in a house. I was a road dog and I simply had to leave, I wasn’t right if I wasn’t gone. I wasn’t a world traveler, journeying around the United States, a bit of Mexico, across Canada, and in Western Europe. I traveled slowly for the most part—it simply took time for things to set in. Once I had the place and people wired in my head, I started looking for new places and faces. It was my literature, reading the lie of people and environs. And what a learning it was. For me, wanderlust was freeing. It freed me from myself at the same time as that wandering seemed to find me. I grew more attentive. I saw in more nuanced ways. I learned the joy of not knowing, of needing to ask. I delighted.

Now, thirty years past my settling down, my wanderlust is returning. I’m feeling a bit boxed in by responsibility, a kind of nagging specter that hovers over me sucking my energy and wonder with the to-do list hammer—OK, I’m the “it” that is happening the nagging specter. Actually, this wanderlust has been afoot for a few years, but I’ve continually put the reality of it on the back burner, even if the thought of wandering and having a rather nothing-pending life grows in me. I’m waiting for a sign I suppose—I learned about those in my traveling as well. So far there has been only waiting. But sometimes waiting is a way to stop waiting, as though enough is enough. With the trip to London and Paris, my horizons expand at least a bit. Maybe I’ll find yet another path and another identity. I think I need to wrap up the current one, though it has served me well and helped me grow. Roots do have their season, and so do legs and wings. There is nothing static about identity, one doesn’t figure it out once and for all—one must keep up with one’s own manifestations and the context in which that manifestation lives. Wanderlust is simply one means that allows the time for reflection outside of the usual frame of reference. It’s a bit tough to see what’s up without stepping outside one’s usualness. One day off a week is fine—for a bit. Annual vacations are also important releases—for a bit. But sooner or later, some of us need to be gone for awhile. That would be me, and it is time for a change.

I guess I’ll watch the horizon for signs. If I run into you out there, let’s take the time to say hello, genuinely, even if we will have to also say goodbye.