That’s All, Folks

The view from my Amtrak window.

[DISCLAIMER: This isn’t really ‘all.’ I have a lot more to say about this journey, and I hope to spend some time in the next few days writing it down. For now, these are my closing thoughts.]

Coming to you from the Amtrak Auto Train.

I’m feeling a mix of emotions. This train ride signifies the end of my first Grand Adventure (though I still have one last five-hour drive to truly finish it after my car and I reach Lorton, Virginia tomorrow morning).

It’s hard to know what to say. I’ve spilled a lot of my soul to the five (or so) of you reading this blog over the last few weeks, and now I have to somehow summarize this life-changing trip.

Yes, life-changing. Everything that I had hoped for in my pre-trip blog post has come to pass, and more.

The “ultimate power of the self-seeking journey” has taken me over.

I don’t think I’ve been saying anything new, anything truly original here. But it’s all new to me. There’s a big difference between reading about a journey of self-discovery and going on one.

Reading about it is akin to the life I was living before: passive, static, hopelessly stuck in “viewing” mode.

Reading about it - witnessing it - hoping for it - is constructive. It alerts you to the possibility of living differently. But it doesn’t fill you with the kind of singular and oh-so-rare sense of true joy, that indescribable feeling of living, that comes when you go out and do it.

That was the feeling I’ve been chasing, and I’ve found it.

It exists in small pockets of time and space. It’s possible to live in that state, but only for short periods of time, not indefinitely. It requires freedom. It lives inside us at all times, waiting to be released. I assume - I can’t know for sure - that it is expressed through different triggers in different people. One person’s moment of aliveness is not always equal to another’s.

I had been worried that I would be lonely doing this by myself. That I’d reach the top of a mountain, and, overcome by beauty and grandeur, turn to a companion who wasn’t there to share the moment, and become disappointed and downcast by my solitude. That didn’t happen.

Instead, all of that happiness and wonderment, all of those feelings I thought I would want to share, having no other soul to flow into, possessed me completely.

In a sense, being unable to express it, to speak it, to release it, meant that moment of pure aliveness had no choice but to feed back into itself, a loop of ecstasy surging through me which I tried to later understand in various ways - as a physical sensation, as happiness, as fulfillment. It was all of those things.

In a word, it was vitality. The essence of life, of living, nourishing my every part, filling me totally, pouring into every cell and crevasse.

I found it in many places. A friend’s apartment. A mountain. A car. A lakeside bench. A plantation. A forest. I found it in solitude. In company. In nature. In hotel rooms. In moments of happiness. Of frustration. Of curiosity. Of doubt.

And I found other things. I found God in every place I went. I found hidden corners of myself. I found truths. I found more questions.

I once read a poem by John Keats for an undergraduate English class. One line of it stuck with me then, and every once in a while it floats through my mind.

“ . . . burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine . . . ”

Ensconced, as this line is, in an “Ode on Melancholy”, out of context, it is not the celebration of life which it seems. Instead it is a bittersweet reminder that beauty, joy, pleasure and delight are all ephemeral, fleeting, gone almost as soon as they arrive.

This poetic truth is so true that I can’t add much. But that line - I wrote it down in one of my notebooks at the time - represented, to me, this feeling of vitality which was so foreign and yet so present. To burst Joy’s grape against one’s palate was to live in an explosion of sweetness, of exuberant release, a triumph of self. I could feel my own tongue proverbially straining at this task. It might only last an instant, but no matter how brief, this was the stuff of life.

Go read the poem.

Yes, this raw vitality is fleeting; that’s why it needs to be chased. And when you reach one of these moments, and stand fully within it, you realize that you’re only living your life between them, in order to get from one to the next. These sharp heights, these punctuations, are what give meaning to everything else.

Am I getting too philosophical now? Should I return to concrete realities? It’s always one or the other.

To reduce, to boil many words into succinct meaning: I’ve been happier, more alive, I’ve had more moments of clarity and joy in these last few weeks than I have over the entire course of the last two years.

What I’ve learned, what I’ve gained, defies expression. What I can say for sure is that I’m opening, growing towards the light, after a long time in darkness. These weeks, I’ve constantly had the uncanny sense of being in the right place at the right time, of being whole, complete, of inhabiting myself, which is so unusual for me, so rare, so precious, that it’s hard to process internally, let alone talk about or write about.

I have burst Joy’s grape against my palate fine.