Home, In Retrospect
As I was driving home on my last day of the trip, a friend sent me a text asking about how my soul-searching was going. He said he hoped I had found what I was looking for. I thought about this simple text for an hour or so prior to breaching the Tennessee border.
One of the unique things that happened on my trip was silence. I had loaded up my iPod with the recently released albums I needed to catch up on, and made sure I had all of my favorite albums ready for their specific moments on the road. I would call them up like an announcer at a sporting event, and they would deliver, and I would be fulfilled. I did no such thing. Two hours outside of Dallas I realized I hadn’t listened to anything. And I loved it. My head moved side to side continuously checking my peripherals for the unknown - and it all was. It is hard to explain the feeling you have when you are alone. The solace of it all. The scarcity you might have car trouble in the middle of nowhere. The way your mind races to understand the smallest things. I spent a good deal of time in one state wondering why they had taken the time to carve the rumble strip in the middle of the lanes in addition to the outside of the lanes where most places seem to do it. Trying to count how many rotations a wind turbine makes in a minute.
Through all of this the idea of soul-searching never occurred to me. I hadn’t taken the trip with soul-searching in mind, but I suppose soul-searching can be the byproduct of searching for anything. I left in search of anything. Mostly things I had never seen before and a few people I had never met before. During that time I came across things I had never seen myself do before and some parts of me I had never confronted or gotten in touch with before.
I hadn’t planned this trip. Two weeks before I left my cousin who lives in Illinois made a simple post that pushed me forward - “Wanderlust,” she said. Quite a word. I began looking into seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time - the initial goal of the entire trip. Over the course of two weeks, a couple text messages, and a bit of courage I had things lined up for one half of the trip. What I saw in it was an opportunity. I had 13 days without anything to do. When I came back I would have two months of being busy and trying to finish up law school. This was my time. When 2011 came around my resolutions were vague and incidental to things I would normally be doing. So why not push forward with the most vague of them all? Do what you can to make 2011 the best year of your life. No matter what happens or who happens or what starts or what ends. This trip seemed like something I couldn’t pass up if I was to make this year not only the most important but the best. So three days before I left, I decided to go.
The most common question I got during the trip from strangers was, “Why did you decide to go alone?” I don’t feel like I ever really made that decision. I suppose I am just capable of going alone. There are very few people in the world I could do this with. Few who would be able to sit and look at something and be able to just silently take it in or know when I am having a moment that requires some solitude. Amongst that small group of people there aren’t any who can just leave a job or leave school or had the money or really cared about it. Going alone wasn’t a problem for me. It never has been. In addition I had a lot of support and kind words from most of my friends along the way - that was helpful.
When I left Dallas, in the silence, I began to wonder why I had left. I wondered how long it would be back if I turned around and went home. I don’t know why. I was seeing these beautiful things and I was excited, but I think a little bit of me was scared. That changed as I was leaving Texas and it was completely out of my mind forever once I hit New Mexico.
New Mexico had a larger impact on me than anything on the trip. I passed a sign that said “The Land of Enchantment” as the sun was going down. I filled my car up with gas and engine coolant and forged ahead. The things I saw next I will never forget. New Mexico was on fire. First the land and the rock mountains and the sky. Then the land got dark and the mountains looked like campfires. There wasn’t a variation of red, pink, and orange I did not see. It was perfect. Then it was all dark and all I could see was the clearest stars on my life and the faint glow of a city that was 150 miles away dancing on the western horizon. Silence. I slept in Albuquerque and the next morning I began driving as the sun was coming up and I watched the entire event rewind itself in front of me.
I tried to post things online to make sure I would remember it all, but I found myself posting photographs and stripped commentary void of the true experience of the trip. Even now, I don’t think I am actually capable of posting the true experience of it all. If soul-searching is part of searching for anything, then the true experience of it all probably hasn’t revealed itself to me yet. Perhaps, one day I will sit in a chair reflecting on it and the most valuable part of the whole thing will be apparent. Or maybe in its divine nature I will continue searching and the results will be maturity rather than a lesson.
For now this is what I know - that there is beauty here in America which I had no idea about. And that there is so much more to discover.
I am home. And in retrospect this is one of the smartest things I have ever done. Some of the things I found inside myself while searching for anything on this trip were things I was ignorant to. As ignorant as I was to the elegant and forgiving landscapes of the desert. It was clear that some things in life you just will not find in other people until you find them in yourself. But I found some of them. And I am convinced that there is so much more to find. Alone or with others. I want to find these things because they make connections possible. They make me a hub with multiple inputs and outputs ready to receive things from places and people that I was once foreign to - ready to push my energy outward. They bring me closer to being a universal bus. They allow me to be better.
I am home. And I will be a little less interesting on the outside than I was when I was gone and exploring. But this has all made me so much more appealing on the inside - to myself especially. I may look like the same guy. I don’t think I necessarily am. Maybe that is soul-searching.
I am home. And I am searching.
