I've been trying to schedule my trip, to think seriously about what it will mean to be really pretty much on the road with myself, my camera and my words for ten weeks or so. I realize how complacent I've become, how completely reliant on my puny pleasures and the comforts of modern living. While I yearn for the great outdoors, I secretly shake at the thought of losing my own bed, giving up the luxury, peace and calmness of my own private space, of being thrust out into the dirty, unruly, cacophonic mayhem of the world at large; to be amongst the great heaving masses with their strange smells, their utterly other personal space requirements and their strange customs and quirks. All my secret fears have been raising their increasingly ugly heads and shattering my illusion of myself as a free spirit. Ok, so I have fears. Everyone has fears, right? It doesn't mean I should cancel my trip or shorten it. I shouldn't give into the nasty spurs of dread as they try to imbed themselves in my expanding vision of my life. I read a great quote recently:
"...to know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die." from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller.
It is like choosing to die, I'm at that point now where if this were a tarot reading skeletal death would be now facing me on his apocalyptic horse or the tower would be crashing down having been rent in half by a bolt from the heavens, as surely my old life must be, I hear it creaking now under the insupportable weight of it's own redundancy. But with this choice of death, along with the inevitable fear is an inescapable excitement, a definite tingle in regions of myself that haven't tingled in quite a while. What will be? As well as the hideousness that can be lurking there is also the beauty and the wonder, the thrill of the ineffable, the spine-wringing whiff of the new that this breeze from the future wafts in through my open window. I will go.
