To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

Traveling alone, you get to be whoever you want. I don't mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can't leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you've broken hearts, the new place doesn't know. If you've lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn't know. If everyone thinks you love Jesus, but you never really have figured out what you believe, the new place doesn't care. It may assume you have it all tied nicely in a bow. All your thoughts and histories. Just feeling like your past isn't a vice to hold you in place can be very freeing. Feeling like your family and the expectations and the traditions and the judgments are absent... it can fill your veins with possibility and fire.

if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning.

There are so many different ways to be human.

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.

I didn't know what I was holding on to. I had wrapped my life in the fear of messing up. Of disappointing God, which really meant disappointing my mom and friends. I was finding that so much of my life had been about avoiding the feeling of being in trouble.

It is astonishing how ideas can change an experience. How we can be in a beautiful forest, on a hike through verdant beauty, but if someone told us that the forest was the site of a brutal massacre, the entire hike would be transformed. It would turn ominous and sad. Or if I was told the forest was where Walk Whitman had walked every morning before working on "Leaves of Grass," the place would take on a holy majesty. Same forest. Same trail and trees. But the idea layered on top of it mutates it, glorifies or damns it.

What if my friends went on without me? What if my absence revealed that I was never really necessary? What if no one notices I'm gone?

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.

She seemed to love him without needing him.

When the honeymoon phase is over, what's left is the continuous choosing of the other person.

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It open you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don't know what's under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a child - why school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns that patters of living. Ever second has value. 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 can't know a smell until I've smelled it. I can't know the feeling of a New York street until I've walked it. I can't feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I can't smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

When you don’t know what to do, you travel. You go out and see. You have to rattle the bed, shake yourself out.

I couldn't give up on my global optimism. I've always believed that the world is far friendlier than it is not, far more loving than hateful. Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled.

Ihave learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You don’t know what’s under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new.

...goals help us get a lot done. But they often remove our attention from the experience to the achievement. When we arrive at our goal, we think, then we will be happy. When we finally get there, we can celebrate and have fun. When I get that job, I'll be fulfilled then. When I get married, I will be happy. The Eden we pine for is not under our own feet or bike tires, but over the next mountain.

The life before had happened to me as childhood happens to everyone. The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life.

If our shittiest actions can lead to beauty, what does it mean to do right and wrong? Is it about avoiding hurting others? What about the scripture, "All things work for the good of those who love God." That sounds about right. But some things never get good. They're just terrible and then you die.

This was life? Quitting the fight and accepting yourself, flaws and all? I don't want to accept my flaws.

I looked around and admired, meandered and felt pangs of love.

On that bus, I had a lot of miles to stare out the window and think about my journey. About expectations. About destinations. I had wanted my spirit quest to answer questions for me. 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. We are the dog that won't stop paddling as long as he sees the shore. But, man, my shore had been hidden by the fog for so long.

I know what i's like to want to be good, to want to be a good boy and a good son and think that God loves me because my teachers loves me, and my friends' parents trust me. You don't love God, man. You love feeling like you belong to something. That warm feeling of order in the universe. Of having the universe on your side, but really, having people on your side. I just want you to be free from all that shit.

I love old drawings and the sketches of cities and animals from ancient field guides. I like timeless things, old things. They've made it to the modern age and taken on a meaning larger than their intention. I wanted my journal to be like that. There is a weird paradox in trying to live a meaningful life, one you will talk about and tell about. There is the present experience of the living, but also the separate eye, watching from above, already seeing the living from the outside.

AS I GREW UP, this smiling kid with a weird name was paying attention, and making assumptions. I absorbed lessons and language and took them as truth. If you were a suburban kid like me, you probably grew up in a school system that wants you to go to college and choose a major and go straight into a job and a marriage and a mortgage. It gives you rungs of achievement: a degree, a wife, a house, kids, golf—whatever—and makes you think these things give life meaning. “Collect them all and win!” But the big fancy adults preach the opposite as well. They say, “fall in line” and then, in the same breath, “think different, take risks!” We are told, “follow your passion” and “stay hungry,” at every commencement and graduation speech. This mixture of school and risk is the holy cocktail of American ideals, and for those rare beacons of exceptional success, it turns their life stories into fables. But for ordinary folks, it is a difficult road to walk. Be sensible, but be wild. Be ordered, but be free. Be responsible, but take risks.

human civilization has managed to get so complex that we cannot trace out the consequences of our actions. So long as the immediate result is what we desire, we are ready to try it—but the threat of long-range danger is harder to feel.

Saying everything you think or do in public isn’t appropriate at a dinner party or online.

I want my reality to be reality, and then test things against it.

how much energy I put into planning, trying to guarantee my independence, but how so many of my best memories have come from the times where I needed help and received it.

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.

For me, only mountains and canyons have this effect on me. The ocean, much bigger than any mountain, lies flat to the horizon. The flatness doesn’t have the same effect on me. But seeing a mountain, I am frightened by the giant standing over me, looking down at me with indifference or maybe love. Or with a canyon, I am frightened by the cliff, the ease with which I could lose my mind and jump. Experiencing those things leaves me properly reduced. I think it is a good feeling. The fear of God.