SOMEONE ASKED ME THE OTHER DAY
As I enter Week 5 of my nursing duties, I just had to share with you what one of the neighbors asked me the other day.
I was outside, painting a cabinet for Puddle Walker, and the paint I was using was a florescent orange. The neighbor stopped and asked me where the cabinet was going. I told her inside the bus. Her face scrunched up and a look which was one part quizzical and one part disbelief transformed her fifty-something countenance.
“Why would you paint a cabinet florescent orange?” she asked, obviously thinking she was asking this question of a crazy person.
“The better question,” I responded, “is why wouldn’t I paint it florescent orange? Bottom line: the color makes me happy.”
Her response . . . “Oh!” And she walked off.
So, here’s the thing. I spent the vast majority of my life being conservative in my dress, conservative in my appearance, and conservative in every other way I presented myself to the world.
And I am so done with that nonsense! I think I’m going to spend my remaining years following my whims, and if my whims are totally off the wall bat shit crazy, so be it. It makes me happy, it’s not hurting one damned person, and I happen to think the world needs a little more florescent orange.
FALLING MADLY IN LOVE
I will share with you a secret . . .
We are not born into this lifetime to know all the answers or to figure everything out or to analyze until the cows come home. It seems to me that we are here to fall madly in love with the beauty of our life’s unfolding.
I think that is one of the reasons Bev didn’t care one iota when she quit the PCT and headed for home. She had answered the questions she had about herself, which could only be answered on the trail, and she is now ready to unfold some more.
It is one of the reasons why I had no qualms about selling the house, abandoning the safety net, and setting out on the road. There are questions which only the road can answer.
I have no desire to live out the remainder of my life stagnant and stunted. I have witnessed, firsthand, that kind of stagnancy in others, and found it very unappealing. I had a former student in middle school who had Spinal Bifida. Wheelchair then, wheelchair now, severely limited in her ability to maneuver through the physical world. She is one of the most vibrant, inquisitive, alive human beings I have had the pleasure to know. And I have other acquaintances in perfect health, their garages overflowing with expensive toys and baubles, their bank accounts flush, got the 401Ks and the house in the Hamptons, so to speak, and they don’t even know how to spell vibrancy or inquisitiveness.
How can a person not be curious about life? How do people spend hours, days, weeks, months creating a personal weather system of storm clouds, thunder, and lightning?
I just don’t understand!
Me? I’m in love, baby, love!
I was watching a video the other day, posted by another nomad, a single woman who has lived out of her Subaru for almost a year, and she was talking about all of the epiphanies which have happened to her while on her journey.
I have had a couple, which I have shared with you in earlier posts, but I think, for the most part, my personal epiphanies will happen slowly, gradually, over time, not some a-hah moment with clouds parting and bright sunshine pinpointed on my angelic face. The fact is, and always has been, that I am not a quick learner. It takes me some serious time to absorb my surroundings, the activities around me, and draw conclusions about it all, especially if the conclusions are about my psyche. I know myself fairly well, but there are some major chasms in that personal knowledge, and hopefully some of those chasms will be bridged as I continue on the road.
I have a friend, lives on the east coast, and she posted a few weeks ago, on Facebook, that she is having a hard time finding someone to date who has any depth at all. I jokingly told her that if she wants depth, she needs to move to the west coast, but for sure that was facetious. I believe there is great depth in most people, but for a variety of reasons, that depth is not allowed to be seen by many. I think a large percentage of humans go through life showing, maybe, 50% of who they truly are, and that may be because of fear, distrust, past hurts, DNA, hell, I don’t know, but I sense the vast majority of people are surface feeders who rarely plumb the depths.
I would love if someone reading this picked up the phone, right now, and called me at 360-878-1757. I don’t particularly enjoy talking on the phone, but I would love to get to know some of my followers on more than a surface level, and since I don’t live terribly close to most of you, and since it may be months, or years, or never, before we meet face-to-face, a phone call at least gives us a fighting chance at actually learning real, meaty things about one another.
Just the random musings of an old man. It will most likely never happen.
360-878-1757. Text me first so I know the ensuing phone call isn’t spam.
Nah, it will never happen.
GOING WITH THE FLOW
I’ve talked before about sitting back and allowing life to come to me, which in many ways is the opposite of how I once lived my life, trying to bend life into a shape I wanted and thought I needed.
A perfect example happened yesterday. I was offered a job down in the California desert at an RV park I stayed at while Bev was on trail. While there I had the opportunity to meet the staff and we became friends during the four days I stayed there. That meeting back in March led to the phone call yesterday. The RV park is looking to hire someone who is familiar with the Pacific Crest Trail hiking community; they want to make their business more appealing to hikers who are passing through March through May, and they thought of me. They want me to work ten hours per week from February (training month) through the end of May, and they will pay me a wage plus a free, full-hookup RV site for Puddle Walker.
I am seriously considering it. Although four months in the desert sounds a bit bleak, the RV park is actually quite nice, very large, and the people are fantastic. It would be a good way for me to increase my savings, do something I am actually good at (customer relations), and spend the bleak late winter/early spring months somewhere where torrential rains rarely happen.
Yep, going with the flow of life. I kinda like it!
I was emailing a fellow nomad yesterday, and she said one reason she enjoys knowing me is because I don’t make lengthy plans far into the future, that I’m a spur of the moment kind of person.
That is partially true, and I am trying hard to make it more true.
At one time I was very structured. I needed the structure to rein in my tendency to become a human hurricane when I felt out of control, which inevitably leads me to drinking. However, I’ve been sober now for almost seventeen years, and I’ve learned other coping skills for when I’m feeling frazzled, so I have let loose my iron grip on structure and allowed the whimsical whatever to slowly infiltrate my personality. So, when my friend asked me where I was going once my caregiving days have ended September 1st, my answer was I’m not really sure. My only plan is to find cooler weather for a few weeks.
Allowing life to come to me.
I don’t give advice unless it is asked for, and none of you reading this asked for it, but I can freely tell you what I feel, and what I do that works for me, and I can tell you that once I stopped trying to control the universe, my life became much more manageable and enjoyable.
Take that for what it is worth.
IMAGINE
Remember the John Lennon song, “Imagine?”
Nice song. Great sentiment.
“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…”
Never going to happen.
That’s a hell of a statement by yours truly, a guy who wants to meet America one handshake at a time, a guy who preaches positivity and love of man, but it’s how I truly feel.
Here’s the thing: there is never going to be world peace. Mankind has always warred, and mankind always will war, and no matter how many times you sing that song, the outcome will remain the same. Somewhere, buried deep in our DNA, is aggressiveness, and that DNA is not going away simply because we sing a song.
Another thing: The economic system is like playing poker against the House, and the House always wins. The percentage of hard-working Americans who actually have savings, a little nest egg in times of trouble, who actually have health care and who can actually weather the next depression, is miniscule at best. And yet the American people bought into the American Dream centuries ago, they are still buying into it, and they will continue to buy into it . . . and you know I’m right on this, and that means a continued struggle for the bottom 99% of humanity. You can imagine a world without possessions or money or greed, but I’m telling you, the Tooth Fairy is fiction as well.
No greed? No hunger? A brotherhood of man? That song brings out the cynic in me quicker than you can say, well, I promised not to talk politics, so that metaphor will have to wait.
So, all is lost, right? If what I say is true, then we might as well hold up our hands, shout “No Mas,” and tuck tail and run for the nearest dark corner, never to be seen again.
And yet . . . the people I have met since we left Olympia in February have been overwhelmingly polite, friendly, and helpful, and I’m talking 99.99999999999 percent of them. Complete strangers have treated us like old friends, and if that ain’t heartwarming I don’t know what is.
There is hope; the cynic is pushed back into the netherworld from which it sprang, and my exuberance about life rises like a Phoenix. There is hope because major changes, like those written about in that song, happen slowly, like a glacier, like the coming of an Ice Age, one ice cube at a time, and in this case one person at a time.
I treat someone with respect and maybe they will do the same with someone else. Maybe they won’t, but it’s a numbers game. If I treat one-hundred people with respect, now we’re talking some positive results in the pay it forward movement. And if everyone who reads this does the same, suddenly we have a minor tsunami working for us, and that’s something to write a song about.
Imagine . . .
