The Things You Collect When Traveling

September 8th, 2007
Seattle, WA

It’s been 36 days since I’ve been back on U.S. soil. The assimilation process into my life as a corporate man has not been as dramatic as I had anticipated, although it became very clear to me when the Continental Boeing 737 left Amsterdam and I began relentlessly gnawing at my finger nails that the thought of returning to my banal corporate existence weighed heavily upon my mind. Incidentally, my finger nails have always been the tell-tale sign of what’s going on beneath the surface. While traveling throughout Europe, my nails looked as strong and healthy as when I was in Africa. By the time I arrived in Seattle at 11pm, twenty hours after leaving Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, there were no nails left to bite.

When I went to bed that evening, I wanted nothing more than to sleep for two days, but there was very little sleeping for me that night in my Phinney Ridge neighborhood…and so on the next night…and the next as my mind struggled to remain in Europe despite the fact that my body was now in Seattle.  

The following morning through no choice of my own I was up at 7:30am. “Wow…” was all I could think as I looked around my basement apartment. You would have thought Hurricane Katrina had swept through my room as the night before I delved into my bags to remove my toiletries and a massive 11 Euro chunk of Old Amsterdam Cheese, and in the process spread this and that here and there.

Around 8am, tired but wired, I walked up to the Phinney Market to grab a Sunrise Breakfast Sandwich and a cup of coffee in preparation for the Herculean task of unpacking and reorganizing my room and life. Little by little I picked apart the pieces that had been a part of me for the past five weeks, things I had either brought with me or collected along the way. Little by little I organized these possessions and artifacts into smaller, more manageable piles. Little by little order was being restored to my world. This is the process by which I do most tasks in my life, whether it is cleaning, writing, solving a problem at work, and so on; break up the mass, divide it into smaller, more manageable parts of similar characteristics, and eventually put them back together in a new way. It is a process that has always worked for me for everything from doing laundry to writing paragraphs.

That morning there were two things lying on my floor besides what I brought back from Europe. The first was a photo album I must have been looking at the night before I left for Europe while pulling an all-nighter so as to not miss my early morning flight. I picked up the photo album and randomly opened it to a picture of me and an old girlfriend who was the first real love of my life. It was with the girl in the photograph I learned about love, about needs, about longing, and about the concessions one must make in a relationship. It was with her that I learned about the things two people can do and express with their bodies when they are in love. And it was also with her that I experienced my first real heartbreak which took me to new, uncharted depths of sadness.

This photo stopped me dead in my tracks as I stared at the younger version of myself looking back at me through a mirror of time. It was humbling. There in the album, preserved and protected behind a sheet of cellophane was a carbon copy of a past moment and time in my life. My past was looking back at me through the eyes of a kid who was as full of hopes, dreams, and goals as he was innocence and naivety. From the outside, this timeless kid looked as if he had everything going for him, and yet on the inside, the life he was living felt very different. On the inside there was a deep-seated pain and sadness that seemed to come from nowhere, and a pain that seemed to be going nowhere soon. That familiar kid wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to feel any differently than this feeling he had come to know – and to be quite honest, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. All he knew was that this pain and sadness had become like a lover with whom he became so comfortable and complacent with that the love had long since moved on and all that was left was familiarity. You know that feeling you have when you’ve been dating or married to someone for so long, and then one day you wake up and you’re on your own? It is as terrifying as it is crippling. Who would this kid be if he did not have this sadness to identify him to himself?

But being that I was the person who experienced the intense feelings and emotions of this kid, I was able to see that photo as if it was a holographic image. In the photo I could see the many layers and levels of that person. One of the images I saw was of an ambitious kid who had a vision of a life he wanted to live; a life that was full of unbounded freedom, raw life experience, and deep self-reflection. The problem was my mind was not yet strong enough to imagine what living that life would actually feel like – or even look like – and without being able to to imagine it, how could I become it? I really can’t fault that kid though; he simply didn’t have enough life experience to form a foundation of faith upon which he could stand.

I’ve spoken of this faith before. Simply put, there is nothing miraculous and divine about this faith and yet that it is where the miracle and divinity is found. That faith is simply about being strong enough and having the courage to realize that somehow, even amongst the darkest despair of your youth, adolescence, and 20s, if you just keep persevering, things will eventually get better. What an awful cliche it is when you are at the bottom, but tomorrow is always another day. What if that one night years ago, in my darkest night of the soul as St. John of the Cross penned, when I felt I was walking alone through the deepest, darkest valley I had ever known, when I thought I could no longer go on because of the weight of the pain and sadness, I actually followed through with my thought to take my own life? That is the thought of a young mind, a mind spiraling out of control.

It is the natural progression of human beings that we must traverse the peaks and valleys of life for if we didn’t we would never learn anything or evolve as individuals, societies, or human beings. Nature partakes in the dance of evolution and we are a product of evolution, so why too wouldn’t the soul of the individual undergo evolution as well? To evolve, one must make great strides in adaptation and one way to do that as a human or spiritual being, is to move through our pain, as opposed to numbing it, keeping it at arm’s length, or keeping it in the peripheral. 

There will always be peaks and valleys on this journey of self-discovery, but I think as you get older, sometimes you get lucky enough to hang out on some really cool plateaus for a while. Although I only have 33 years of life experience, from watching those around me, it seems every decade these plateaus become more and more expansive and the peaks and valleys less and less steep; either that or years of conditioning have prepared us for these parts of the journey.

This is not to say there will not always be something right around the bend that will challenge us and shake our tree of life to the core. What we must remember, however, is that when that tree is shaken, from its boughs and limbs fall fruits and seeds, and from this regenerative process, the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth, continues and perpetuates.

There was one other thing that lay on the floor that morning which I had rediscovered when I moved into my house several months prior. In an effort to not misplace it, I Scotch-taped it to the wall where it blended in and once again I forgot about it. But there it was on the floor, a message from the past that was as timeless as when I first received it. It was a note my friend Eileen had written me several years prior on a piece of paper torn from a “While You Were Out…” memo pad. On it the quote read, ”The universe expands or contracts in proportion to one’s courage.”

I continued the process of organizing and sifting through the mess my travels abroad had now made in my room. Since I am a writer, or perhaps a more accurate description would be an archivist of my own life, I was amazed to see the things I had collected on my trip. Each item was an artifact from an archeological dig of the mind, body, and spirit. Each artifact brought with it vivid images that would forever link me to a time, place and a unique feeling I experienced at one brief moment of my life. Among the items were; maps of cities such as Amsterdam and Genoa, tickets to museums, business cards of people who I had briefly encountered, scraps of ripped out notebook paper with phone numbers, a lighter from a coffee shop in Amsterdam, a small bag of “coffee” hidden from my final inspection before I left Amsterdam, airplane boarding passes, train and ferry tickets, a travel insurance policy, index cards with ridiculous questions on them, a handful of Euros, my own business card of a “company” that brought form to a formless idea (which turned out to be the driver of the whole trip), five books that I dragged to Europe, two of which I carried in my backpack all over the south of France and none of which I actually read. How can I be expected to read others people’s books when I barely have enough time to write my own? My mind went back to the planning phase of the trip and I could hear Bret say, “Timbo, all that crap adds up and you don’t need it. Your pack might feel OK now but after a few hours on the trail it’s gonna get a lot heavier.” Every morning in a different village in Provence, I would pack up my gear for the day’s walk and Bret would say sarcastically, “It’s a good thing you brought those books, huh Timbo?” To which I would reply with matched sarcasm, “I am getting so much reading done.” It was part of our daily routine.

***

Perhaps the hardest part of returning to my daily life in Seattle is that my dedication to my writing suffers. As the daily hum-drum existence of going to work slowly eats away at the mountain of inspiration I’ve been hoarding, I find it harder and harder to be disciplined and make time to write. As always, I have either my journal or a small pocket notebook at arm’s length and as always I am writing down ideas, images, or pieces of conversations. Finding the time to formulate these sketches into something of form is proving to be challenging, however. It may sound ridiculous to the layman, but as a writer or as with any type of creative person, not being able to get those thoughts, ideas, and feelings out of you weighs so heavily on your mind that it can throw off the balance of your entire world. And thus as a creative person, going too long without being able to express one’s self means walking a fine line between madness and depression.

To carry the momentum of inspiration that a grand experience like travel affords a person requires one to really be conscious of maintaining it. Part of that challenge is learning to keep your eyes fresh and attentive to the minutia of your daily life and surroundings; in other words, being present in the moment and being able to draw inspiration from the smallest and sometimes seemingly inconsequential things in your life. As our new friend Darby from L.A. said at a wine tasting in the little hill town of Giogondas, “It’s not hard to be present in Provence, but being present in your daily life is an entirely different challenge. It’s fucking hard,” she added.

That first weekend home there was plenty of celebratory drinks to mark my return. One evening a friend of mine said to me, “There is something different about. I can’t put my finger on it. You seem more grounded, centered, at peace or something.” I couldn’t help but think about this comment the next day. It made me once again think about my trip and my life as an ever-evolving process and unfolding. I think part of what occurred on this trip, and what continues in this part of the process I am living, is that I shed the final layers of a former angst-ridden and uneasy self. This most important part of the life-process I underwent and continue to undergo, began when I made the decision to go to Africa ten months ago. Will this wave of momentum and good-feeling continue? Is it real? Is it just the delusions and grandeur of an inspired soul? How long it will last I can not tell you.

What I can tell you, however, dear friends and readers is that it began when without a clue as to what I was getting myself into, filled with fear and trepidation, I put one foot in front of the other and took that first step forward. With that step I said “fuck it all” and went to work in an orphanage in Africa by myself. It was a blind leap of faith I think even Kierkegaard would have been proud of. 

If there is one thing I learned through that leap of faith, it’s that fear is just a wall you have to blast through if you ever want to get anywhere. I’ve found in my own life that with every wall of fear you blow through, as you burrow and mine your way from center earth to the surface on your ascent towards the heavens, more and more light fills your life. And consequently each wall you move through is easier than the last. Perhaps that incandescent light that illuminates the sometimes cavernous regions of our souls is the light of faith.

***

As I said in the beginning of this story, through processes I can’t explain, the tectonic plates of my interior life have been shifting and on the move for some time, and when tectonic plates shift, they alter landscapes, mountains, oceans, and continents. I think within me a new continent has been formed. Perhaps it happened on Bastille Day, the most powerful “Serengeti Moment” on this trip. Unlike the original Serengeti Moment (which actually occurred in the Serengeti), this was not an introspective happening that gave birth to an epiphany. Instead, Bastille Day brought me to - and opened me up to - a new space for joy in my life. There is an ever-growing part of me that believes this is what life is about; experiencing the unexpected and unbounded joy that is found in the loving of your own life. After all, you can’t begin to love others until you love yourself.

Again, as I said before and as I continually (perhaps even annoyingly) reiterate, you can frame this internal experience I speak of in a thousand different lights. Earlier in the story I called it a part of the spiritual experience of life. Regardless, language limits it. If you mixed all the colors on a painter’s palette in all the possible variations, you still couldn’t touch this experience for it is beyond human communication and exists as an intangible wave of internal feeling.

The best way I can explain it is that this spiritual experience is about finding and bringing it into the world the joy, peace, creativity, inspiration, freedom, and truth that exists in each of us. It is about bringing form to the formless. It is about being a master of your fears and the lighthouse of your mind. It is about giving up the fight and, like water, taking the path of least resistance. It is about becoming free enough to move in the many directions your life will take you. Most importantly, it is about doing whatever it takes to find that within you that gives you joy, because we were made to experience and create joy in this life - at least that’s what I think. You can either look at the world as I did for so many years as a place full of pain and despair, or you can look at the world as a place full of love and hope. I choose to live by the mantra of the latter.

I’m feeling these days like I’ve been given a chance to start fresh and anew. I feel like time is no longer mastering me, but instead for the first time in my life I am the master of time. I feel as if I have made new clearings in my life, clearings to be filled with an abundance of love and creativity. I am excited, revitalized, and focused on the goals I have ahead of me. The challenge for me I know, the challenge for all of us, is to be the gatekeeper of our thoughts, and to keep our thought focused on the abundance of blessings in our lives in the form of friends, family, love, and support, because like any free-standing structure, a human being needs support as well. No man is an island, as John Donne said in an attempt to portray the interconnectedness of mankind. 

 

Although it is somewhat scary at times because we have a tendancy to fear a crash when things are going well in our lives, I feel as if I am in a space of my life where I am attracting into my world that which I need to take me to the next level, whatever that level may be or mean. What is new for me is that I know, after feeling stuck for so many years, that I am moving forward into new and exciting uncharted waters of my life.

 

It’s not just a mere hope or wish anymore that I become that which I have always wanted to be, but instead something I innately know and feel in my entire being. I am. And when I am feeling at my best and living as I am these days in a healthy mind, it’s as if every living part of me is aware of the process of movement my life is undertaking, and every part of me, down to the cellular level, is working in communion toward Creation. I think it comes down to me recognizing and accepting the person within me, the person who I have always been, and the person who I have always been meant to become. It was only a matter of having the fortitude to learn to how to use the vessel I have been given, setting my sails to the wind, and righting myself on the course upon which I have always been meant to travel. Sometimes you just have to be lost for a while to find your way home.

 

The windows through which I have been looking out most of my adult life have been cleaned. Instead of peering through the muck, dirt, and grime of failed expectations, disillusionment, and seemingly paradise lost, I once again peer out through the windows of my youth. I am, at least in this moment, a soul who is more at peace with himself then ever before. The windows are clear and clean, the view unobstructed, and on the other side of this pane of glass is a world that awaits my imagination to transform it into a playground.  

(stay tuned!)