The ADT: On the Eve

Reflections and anxieties the night before

Am I ready?—Yes; Am I ready?—No

So here you have it, my final answer.  The rest?—Pending development.  Other questions I’ve been asked: Are you excited?—No; Are you nervous?—No.  The truth is I’m a lot of things, insincere not amongst them.  For what it’s worth, with me you get me as I am.  I know the course I’m about to walk, the challenges I am certain to face.  I’ve been living in an existential sort of way for some time now.  To be honest, I no longer know any other way to live.  And I like it as it is!  I wouldn’t say “I take myself seriously,” not in the way such things are said these days, as if an awareness of both “self” and “world” should be avoided or minimized to a flighty sort of freedom, weightless…

If you get to know me, you’ll know I laugh as often as I cry.  You’ll learn I dance through the night while the world sleeps, in the middle of the street, an empty park, the pouring down rain.  You’ll understand that I sing until my voice runs raw, driving down the road, atop a mountain, staring down the depths of a bottomless canyon… though the lyrics often jumble in my picture collage sort of mind… I sing nonetheless.  I write broken verse poetry, I break rules as a matter of advocacy and activism, I demand perfection in all my imperfection… I demand nothing of you!

For the last few days, I’ve been staring at my pack.  It feels there’s something I should be doing.  I’ve been staring at the walls too, my cage and my security, a contradiction in need of resolution… a contradiction, that is, when laid against the backdrop of freedom understood in an outward sort of way.  It definitely feels there is something I should be doing.  But at this point I’ve done it.  I’ve spent the last month eating as if each meal were my last.  I’ve put on a good few pounds.  I’ve been lifting some free weights and beating on a punching bag daily.  I haven’t bothered to train aerobically, as such fitness comes naturally to me.  For at least two decades now people have been telling me that changes with age.  They don’t know me though—catch me if you can!

The last few days I’ve been feeling a rare sort of peace, a peace that comes, I think, from knowing the path ahead—“es muss sein”/“it must be” (Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being).  The path behind hasn’t always been fair, the struggle as conspired as it has been mine to overcome, the circumstances as fateful as they have been mine to transform.  I’ll be traveling by train to reach the beginning of my walk, my next walk, a continuation of a walk I’ve already been on.  I knew I couldn’t fly; I knew I did not want to lose my contact with the ground or my connection with the world.  I knew I did not want to merely slingshot my consciousness (body in tow!) from coast to coast, as if to blink we can truly travel, that is travel… to grow.