In the past, I listed many of my favorite quotes in the "About" section of this blog, but I thought I might take a moment to talk about some of those quotes, and others, and why they are important to me. I am not under the false impression that my thoughts are novel or thought-provoking, rather I see this as an exercise to seek a deeper understanding of their relevance in my own life.
One might also read all these comments and think, “Isn’t it convenient that his beliefs parallel his past experiences. It’s easy in retrospect, after the race has been run, to massage your experiences to fit the narrative.” I certainly acknowledge this trap, but the nagging questions, not allowing me to live within the bag of skin I was born into, did kick off a journey of questions, and for that I am ever grateful.
“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” - Azar Nafisi
This quote is self-explanatory on a superficial level. It can apply both to leaving home, or maybe to the end of a trip where you engaged in relationships and experiences that caused a shift in your perspective. But, what I also find interesting in this quote, when analyzing from the perspective of travel, is how freeing yourself from your past allows you to live in the present. The people that you meet on your travels only know you in the present. They know nothing of the baggage you carry. They only know the you of the last 2 hours or 2 days. It is rather easy to create a persona that is accommodating and appealing for such a short time, especially when you are enjoying yourself. But the important part here, for me, is why can’t you feel and live that way back home even with the baggage? Why is it so hard to live in the present? You see the benefit, why not duplicate it?
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” - Hemingway
A famous quote written in Hemingway’s simplistic style, but powerful, nonetheless. If you go through life without scars, eventually you will run into adversity in your later years and will be unable to handle it. I saw it every day in the ICU of the hospital. Even if you do face adversity early in life, but stubborn and vain, thinking you can retain your impenetrable front, without being vulnerable to the potential devastation and rebuilding, you will just as easily be reduced to nothing eventually. If you allow yourself to be injured, to cry, to love, you will experience short term gashes, but you will weather the storm and be better for it.
"I thought how far I was from where and when this journey began, how I was so distant from that fellow passing for me twenty months ago, the one so eager to learn the secrets of the river passage. Could he – the me of the moment – and I sit down together, he would want to know what I knew and absorb what I had experienced, and he would regard me enviously, just as I do those men who have returned from the moon. But there would be forever a difference between him and me: I went and he did not. He set the voyage in motion, but he could not take it..." - William Least Heat Moon
I enjoy planning trips. Hell, I enjoy planning trips that I have no intention of taking. Researching the routes, the lodging, the restaurants and the history. After all this planning it eventually comes time to embark. I get to see all the places I visualized. Sometimes it is better than the expectations, often it is not. I appreciate the above quote not only for how a trip changes you from the person who did not take it in a positive way, but also in a negative one. Many times, the reality doesn’t live up to the billing. You may have a bad interaction with a local, you get robbed, or a famous landmark is nothing more than a tourist attraction full of Instagrammers and the peddlers that cater to them. Over the long-term, due to our dopamine addiction, it takes a bigger monument, a more remote tribe, or a more dangerous motorcycle trip to excite you. Still, there are those experiences that cannot be passed along by a recounting of events in a blog; enjoying a simple meal on the floor of a local dwelling.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...” -Henry David Thoreau
I listen to the audiobook, Walden by Thoreau, a few times each week before going to bed. When I was in my 20s, I struggled with breaking free from the mindset that was implanted in me. I eventually cast off most possessions, choosing to live in a bare apartment on a mattress. I fantasized about moving into the woods for a period. Although I did challenge myself in my beliefs and career choices, I never was able to break free enough to take that ultimate step. I envy Thoreau for what he did and how long he stuck with it. I remain proud of my ability to get down to my version of basic existence to determine what is important in my life: truth and compassion.
“Whatever goes upon 2 legs is an enemy, whatever goes upon 4 legs or has wings, is a friend.” - George Orwell
Animal Farm, one of my favorite books discussing the concept of “absolute power corrupts.” We watch elected officials squirm, going along with ever increasing absurd and embarrassing actions of our president to keep their job. Changing acceptable norms for their office on the fly, just as the pigs in this novel cross out the “Commandments” listed on the barn wall. The second congressmen announce retirement; they begin to show a spine and somewhat of a moral compass. Did they always lack values, or must you sideline ethics to get elected by your constituents?
“Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How hard it is to break free from both nature and nurture to create a person of your own choosing. I fight it every day and fail more times than not. It is one of the most challenging undertakings in life once the clay has hardened in adulthood. Meeting one who is the opposite of their upbringing, I marvel at their ability to rewire the frontal cortex. Not to say you shouldn’t try to keep adding water to reshape the form.
"You can't be neutral on a moving train." - Howard Zinn
I constantly struggle with compartmentalizing how I feel about a person’s beliefs and my own relationship with that individual. You see a friend bully someone in the playground, but you don’t say anything. You feel bad, but you remain friends because they have always been kind to you. A lack of personal integrity in my mind. I will not stand by and allow others to be marginalized or cheated when I can either correct the wrong, or punish the person for bad behavior, whether by discontinuing friendship or educating them and start the clock ticking.
“You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake... This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.” - Chuck Palahniuk
People need to realize that we are sacks of skin, a manifestation of the universe, and nothing more. There is no grand purpose or meaning to your life. You are not the center of the world, nor the ultimate evolutionary creation. You are just a combination of particles that joined together for a brief moment in time, so stop acting otherwise. Appreciate the nonsensical game the world is playing and enjoy the ride. In my profession I meet people who end up in the hospital who are shocked to be there, even if they made smart choices like eating a balanced diet, exercising, being kind to fellow man. Did you think you were going to live forever? How did you think this was going to go? If you exercise everyday you can’t have a heart attack?
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense” - Buddha
We live in a world of soundbites. I hear people spouting off “facts” they heard on their “news” channel or podcast. How the Isreal-Palestine War would end if “X” happened. How inflation would go down when we start doing “Y”. I am fairly certain your friends are not experts at Mideast Relations, or next in line for chair of the Federal Reserve. Anyone who thinks they have the answer to complex questions, has no clue.
“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D. H. Lawrence
It would be great if we could sit down with each other and have honest discussions, but it seems impossible for people to allow themselves to be vulnerable, or they are just so far lost in their own mind that they truly think they are unique intelligent beings. I have found that it is possible to strip people down to their raw chemistry; To see what they are really made of. When they’re chronically ill, and even facing possible death, you see their true colors as the guard has been lowered. We do not wish ill on most people, but another way to accomplish this is to get them out in the wilderness away from devices and comfort and see how they act.
“Somewhere it is being prepared. Somewhere deep in the heart of Germany the shell is being made. Some German girl is polishing it right now and cleaning it and fitting the charge into it. It glistens in the factory light and it has a number and the number is mine. I have a date with the shell. We shall meet soon.” - Kurt Vonnegut
This reminds me of the “Butterfly Effect” or Chaos Theory: The simple flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan can have monumental effects on the other side of the world through the cascade of events it triggers. I like to sometimes think how close to death I may have come on various occasions and the forces that prevented it, or even less extreme events like a chance encounter. “The randomness of it all”, well maybe not. Is there such thing as free will? Can we outrun our destiny. We know so little about our brains. Does one truly have a choice in becoming a sociopath? How about murdering a room full of strangers?
“You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.” - Anne Lamott
I find believers in religion interesting. The ones using it to quiet the mind and seek reflection, I admire. The ones believing they have a relationship with the “one true God” are a bit of a conundrum. Finally, the ones who rely on their religion to create laws affecting the rest of us are abhorrent. Since the beginning of time. man was surrounded by unexplained phenomena. Why did the Moon float in the sky? Why did the Nile flood each year? To avoid the consternation the unexplained causes within the psyche, a god was created to settle the anxiety. As science increasingly explained away these mysteries, our gods got fewer and less directly responsible. Now they take the shape of one who “sets the ball in motion.” At some point in the future, we will understand even more, and god will lose more control. I won’t even add in the idea that out of the thousands of gods out there, you just happened to pick the real one. Congratulations, you won the lottery!
“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” - George Bernard Shaw
We are in the middle of xenophobic times here in the United States. This quote is a timeless response, and pairs nicely with the god delusion quote above. “America the Great Experiment,” the leader of the free world. Always on the right side of history. Kinda reminds me of the quote that those who win wars get to write the history. We treat allegiance to countries like home sports teams. Someone born on the opposite side of The Rio Grande is playing, or rooting, for the wrong team. I actually view them as being more important because they need our assistance. When travelling, people dance around the discussion about the “dumpster fire” going on here. I say, “don’t worry, people that say “America first” don’t travel outside America so you are safe to tell me what you really think.” They already have all the answers, why would they need to go looking for any? And they certainly aren’t going to go looking for them in a wet market in some village in Laos.
“I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup.” - Henry Rollins
I love the imagery here of the “sweaty-toothed madman” speaking the truth. The juxtaposition of the world’s view of “making it.” I look at all these people repeating their days, driving their fancy cars into the garages of their fancy houses, going on their safe vacations to Cabo San Lucas. I want to shake them saying, “You are missing so much!” So much emotion, experiences, questions. I can’t imagine if I had not upturned the stone leading to my life.
