Raison d’Etre

An obscure anniversary came and went last month, and I did not realize it until some days after. Seventeen years. A fateful decision, a dazzling mix of excitement and fear, happiness and guilt, wonder and relief and anxiety. I expected to start a new life. I did not expect to become a new person. Nothing could have prepared me for being where I am now, knowing what I know, and having experienced what I have. Seventeen years ago I stepped off a plane and life was never the same again.

I remember sights and sounds, smells and voices and infinite little details that were all new. It was a bright and perfect California morning and I felt I could do anything. Beyond the excitement, though, I could vividly remember the days just before. Most clearly, I remembered the exact moment when the fear of not doing became just a hair more powerful than the fear of doing, and there was no going back. It was not a happy moment. It was a terrifying realization that I had to jump track, to start a new journey; not even knowing where it may lead but taking some comfort in the thought that it had the potential to be better than the one I was traveling. It was a feeling I had known before and will experience again, with the same terror, some years later.

How strange it is, sitting in my living room now, silently watching the sublime red glow of the rising sun creep up ancient sandstone cliffs, lighting up the delicate little branches in the bare cottonwoods along the street, in a tiny town nestled in a high valley, hundreds of miles removed from any big city, thousands of miles from the geography of my youth (much of which no longer exists). Sitting here, as I do, I am physically closer to outer space than to the nearest city, and even that one would just barely qualify by most people’s standards. And yet, I feel more at home here than I ever have.

I have to pause every so often and digest what I’ve learned, to put it into a coherent context, to see the patterns and directions, and try to determine what my life is “about” without resorting to platitudes. It’s a mode of thought that did not occur to me much in my first thirty-some years but one that I find myself pondering with increased frequency as time passes. For whatever reason I never quite mastered the skill of believing my own lies. At times I found it to be as much a handicap as anything else. Maybe I’m just a really bad liar. Still, it is this incessant need to explain myself to myself that brought me to this desert paradise, after a strange and improbable journey; and for the first time I know what I want the rest of my life to be like, and I’m done running.

Time to hit the road again next week, and lose myself once more in the vastness of the Western landscape. Days alone behind the wheel on long empty roads, some miles walking on and off the trails, reading by the light of a headlamp at night and admiring a canopy of stars to the sound of a chorus of coyotes and the soft crackle of a small campfire. This is what my life is “about,” and how could I ever have predicted it? For better or worse, I’m happy.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads? –Albert Camus

Willows and Cottonwoods (part of the Vegetative States portfolio)

Tags: american west, guy tal, Journal

Category: Featured, Journal