Got back home last night at 11 pm after about 15 hours on the road.
I think I learned more yesterday than I have in a very long time. Not only did I listen to a copious number of podcasts and YouTube videos, but I had some time to self-reflect.
Changing times always elicit change within . . . Renewed perspectives, fresh starts, those sorts of things. In this way, it is true that what goes on around us influences what goes on within us.
I’m sitting here today at the cafe that I always go to when I’m home in a state of surprising satisfaction.
It feels good to be home. I guess I anticipated this. I do love coming home, especially in the summer. But I feel, right now, this profound appreciation for where I’m from.
I didn’t always appreciate this place. I guess it’s hard to appreciate things when you’re with them so much. We are inherently nomadic beings and are, it seems to me, programmed for change. It’s not just that we can handle it, but that we need it. We need to move around; we need to experience different things because it is how we were made to exist.
I’m fairly certain that humans started to settle down 10,000 years ago when we realized we could put a seed in the ground and turn it into a plant that we could eat.
When we realized we could grow food, and have a steady supply, rather than having to run around and do all this bullshit to find it and harvest or catch it, we settled down, and civilization took its first hold.
But, in the grand scheme of things, 10,000 years is the blink of an eye, if that . . . Really not anywhere close to enough time for any significant evolution to take place. The bodies we still roam the world in—sitting in cafes, and working in offices, and traversing city landscapes—are the same bodies (save for a few extra pounds) with which we were nomads on the planet tens and hundreds of millennia ago.
Why do I say this? Well, I guess just to add some context.
I do feel this utter peace now, not being bound to anything, now done with school and out of my lease. This good fortune is multiplied by my membership to a family in an amazing town in a lovely home, with a happy dog and proximity to the lakes of Wisconsin and Michigan, right smack dab in the middle of the country—the perfect home base for the adventures I seek.
What feels most enchanting at this moment is the fact that I don’t see much past the next step or two that I’ll take. I see a variety of possibilities, but I don’t know what’ll come of my life in the next several months.
I could be here for a couple of weeks and then head back to Charleston and up to New Jersey and New York. Or I could explore the Great Lakes, or I could head out west, or down to Miami . . . I think it is this potential for so many great things that’s filling me with such hope, though I’m not sure I’d call it hope exactly.
It is that I finally broke out of my mundane routine in Charleston and can now wander the world as I so please. New, unexpected things are on the horizon, and I have no plans other than what lies before me.
I despise plans, actually. There’s something so anchoring about them, and not in a good way. The thing is, though, that most people can’t handle going without plans. They need to know what they’re gonna do. And I think this is only because they struggle so much to take life as it comes and be with the moment.
And, of course, we do, in a way, need plans. I often make plans . . . In fact, I’d say I always have rough plans for what I’ll do. But these plans are always malleable.
I am getting, as I did yesterday, an influx of these good feelings that bring me back to my childhood. And it’s a little scary because I’ve been having so many coincidences in my life recently.
For example, as I was driving yesterday, I was thinking of something a psychologist said about the ego, and right as the word ego entered my mind, I turned my head to a billboard for no apparent reason, and on the billboard, in giant type, was those three letters, in the exact same order.
Before that, I had been at a cafe with my friend, and I was perusing for jobs, and she suggested I work at a magazine. She looked some up that were local and found this one called Garden & Gun, which I had never before heard of. And I didn’t look too much into it other than what she showed me.
The next day, I was delivering food, as I always do during lunch, and I took an order, for the first time ever (for context, I have been delivering in Charleston for nearly 5 years), to the magazine’s headquarters. And I thought, only because I had endured so many other coincidences recently, that this was just another weird one. I mean, I had been delivering on the 2 square-mile peninsula for nearly five years, and only a day after my friend mentioned this place did I deliver right to its entrance.
But that wasn’t the craziest one . . . I think the craziest one was this:
For some reason, swimming came into my mind just last week. I used to swim competitively and have kept up the habit intermittently throughout the years.
The last time I swam regularly to maintain my health was at the end of last summer.
So, for some reason, perhaps because I saw a pool or was in my friends’, or was on a boat, or was so out of shape compared to how I had been before, I felt the need to hop back in the pool and restore my fitness.
I put a reminder on my phone to swim at MLK (Martin Luther King—the name of the pool) for the following day at 2 pm.
Now, I typically set reminders in my phone when I need to do something at a certain time, or if there is something I want to do in general within a certain time period, I’ll make it a reminder rather than adding it to my to-do list, so I don’t forget about it, since my to-do list is so lengthy, and things there often are left for months or more.
And so this became a reminder.
And, of course, I forgot about it in the meantime.
The next day, I was making my deliveries near lunchtime, as always, and nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
And it came time that I was getting ready to be done since the orders were slowing down, and so I figured I’d take one more order.
So I picked up the order, well, both orders, since it was a two-parter. I dropped off the first order, though I don’t remember where, and then proceeded to my second drop-off.
The location was a little weird . . . It was in a neighborhood but in some parking lot, which turned out to be MLK. And I guess I didn’t think much of it at the time, even though it was the first time, yet again (though this happened before the first coincidence), that I had ever dropped an order off at this place. And so, I got out of the car with the order and proceeded down the sidewalk toward the pool entrance.
And just before I got to the steps of the entrance, my phone made a noise—the reminder noise that iPhones make—and I pulled it out of my pocket, and the reminder read “Swim at mlk.”
I don’t remember if I got goosebumps then, but how could I not have?
Anyway, I’ve had one or two more of those recently, and I don’t know exactly what’s going on. My dreams haven’t been too weird, but I have noticed these rather euphoric feelings arising within . . . The feeling I talked about yesterday that brings me back, not just to my childhood, but to the good times I experienced and had always hoped to experience. That sort of free life where you’re seeing people you love all the time and doing fun things and having cool experiences and not just being bound to things that you don’t necessarily love and certainly fall out of love with as time goes on due to perpetual exposure.
Perhaps it could be that I’m not drinking and doing nicotine so much anymore. But I suspect it’s that I’m doing more of what I thought I should start doing a couple of weeks ago, which is diving into things and going deep.
In the past two weeks, I’ve spent more time reading, writing, and listening to podcasts than I have in a very long time, especially on the consumption end. I sense my life is getting deeper. I am connecting with those things, those feelings, that were once so far away from me. I am pursuing a life of curiosity.