Resuming the journey

Although - I try to remind myself regularly - the journey never stopped. Perhaps the journey never started, in the normal sense. We are born en route, and what is up to us is to decide what direction to move, at what speed, carrying what thoughts and feelings, keeping what company.

Alas, I have neglected this blog for a time out of fear, out of despondency, out of mental and emotional frozenness. I long to be traveling again, to be traveling forever - if not for the geophysical freedom then at least for the way I feel in my soul when the body around it stays in motion. I long to be free of the confining, corrosive fears and snapping metal jaws that growl and fight over the scraps of my spirit, my identity, over a huddled self that has learned to the detriment of every other skill how to look for and avoid anything in life that contains even a whiff of danger.

From within this place of fear, I fear most of all what I am missing: what I am failing to remember, failing to discover, failing to ask, failing to pursue, failing to learn, failing to love.

Almost every day I ask self what on earth I'm doing, and I almost never have an answer.

So much of life seems to be an autopilot experience. There is a design method in gaming called "on rails," and this captures how I often feel. It is like I am not choosing anything - just trudging along the highway that has already been cleared, graded and paved. Life is then just a matter of pressing only the buttons I am given to press, at the times I am expected to press them, in order to at best achieve (not exceed) a set number of points that were allotted to me before I was even born.

Another fearful thought I have is that I am obligated to play out my "genetic fate." I may or may not have read this term somewhere but I'm sure I am not the first to use it: to me the term means that one's lineage, and/or all the socioeconomic baggage that comes with it, decide for you what "choices" you will get to make.

Even when I cut across open country, even when I run as fast and far as I can from what seems predictable, from what I think is demanded of my genealogy, even when I feel a sense of adventure, creative pride or the power of self-determination, am I not still pursuing a path, albeit a less well-traveled one? Is there not some cosmic, or biological, or political design underlying every thought and feeling I have, every decision and action?

It has been months now since I returned from Europe, and I feel that the self I "became" over there has almost entirely shrunk and been reabsorbed by the sulking, slinking creature I usually am. So were those new facets of myself just lesser, short-lived elements of the disappointing, uninspired creature I usually experience myself to be?

I try to think in ways I am not accustomed to thinking, and find it immensely difficult, if not impossible. I try to make decisions I have not already made a hundred times, and my mind freezes in the middle of the thought. I search in myself for unfamiliar and perhaps liberating feelings, but cannot find them and hardly know how to even look.

Is there a sequence of steps, of moves, to unlock my life? Take, for instance, my desire to try living in another country for a while. What is the algorithm? Learn the language first? Find a job first? Find a place to live? Get a visa? Make friends and/or find a girlfriend? What do I do with my life here in the meantime? Possessions? Money? Health care?

In Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman uses "activity" as a useful label for a collection of behaviors - an activity is a set of tasks one performs to achieve a goal. Each "task" represents a simple unit of action toward the completion of the activity. (For example, an activity is "I want to clean my teeth," and one possible set of tasks are to buy a toothbrush, buy toothpaste, put the toothpaste on the toothbrush, put the toothbrush under running water, put the toothbrush in my mouth, rub on my teeth, rinse and spit out the resulting foam.)

Life feels so full of tasks that I can barely tell what activities they relate to, let alone what goals they are achieving. And when I try to work backward from a goal I think I want to pursue, I quickly run into my own ignorance concerning what tasks are necessary to accomplish that goal. Sometimes I even question whether the goal is truly a goal, or if even a goal is itself a task in another, larger goal.

Enough of all this for now. Let this laborious ramble serve as my announcement of intention: I will keep moving, however haphazardly, and I will keep reflecting on the meaning and direction of that movement. I hope, in the process, to offer some benefit to you as well.

Along the way, we shall see what becomes of us.