Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out.
~Chekov
One of the people I met on this latest trip used to be an IT consultant. Then one day on her drive home she decided she couldn't do it any more. So she fed-ex'd her laptop to her boss and headed for the airport to, in her words, "travel for as long as I can."
She's a hero of mine.
I'm a big fan of quitting the mundane to have an adventure. Of living like there are no consequences. Other people can worry about the money or their 401k. Other people can worry about their jobs and their careers and their social ladders.
The problem with an adventure is that it's hard to recognize when you're in the middle of one. People ask me about traveling and I tell them all the parts I love. The people I meet, the places I see, the feeling of freedom.
What I don't talk about are all the nights my tent has leaked, or being half eaten to death by fleas in some shit hostel and the itchy bumps I had all over my face and arms for weeks afterwards. I don't talk about hiking fourteen miles then throwing up from exhaustion. Or how the next night I stepped off a curb wrong and how terrified I was that I had just broken my ankle with no health insurance, six thousand miles away from home.
I don't tell them about standing on a beach in Alaska at one in the morning feeling very alone, wondering if, after a life time spent running away from my problems and from the parts of myself that I don't like, if this wasn't just one more example of that. On a night like that, Alaska doesn't feel like an adventure, it feels like getting kicked in the teeth.
The funny thing about adventure is that it's delicate. You need to buy into it for it to happen. Some people aren't cut out for it. They don't want to deal with the inconvenience, the discomfort and the (sometimes) danger it takes to see something amazing. Everywhere I go, there are stories of people who were horrified that they had to cook their own food or miserable because it didn't stop raining. They let the pain of traveling ruin the rest of the trip.
That's the thing about ripping yourself violently out of your comfort zone. You get to see what kind of person you really are. Those moments give you perspective on the rest of your life even if they just make you regret ever leaving home.
This trip couldn't have come at a better time. Before I left I was really starting to lose perspective on things. I try not to write about all the mundane shit that happens around here. I don't write about the database crashes that leave me scratching my head because fuck me, I don't really know why a database goes down. Or when FastCGI fails on the server (and I still don't know what the fuck it does or what went wrong with it). Thank god for google, or I'd probably be out of a job. I try not to write about how much I hate LA. All that is there, day to day, but no one wants to read about it.
But that daily grind does get to me and I let it eclipse all the cool shit that's happening. I couldn't have designed a better job for myself and yet some days, working still feels like work. I've got this amazing opportunity where I might one day support myself as a writer, something I never really believed I could do, and some days when I sit down in front of the computer, I can't think of one damn thing to say.
Some days I'm still looking for the big grand gesture. I want to quit for the sake of quitting. To tell people how I said "fuck it all" so I could live life on my own terms. To storm out of the office, the lone person brave enough to walk away from it all. I'm good at the grand gesture. It's the day after, when I'm unemployed and I have to start living by those ideals when I struggle.
But that's where I find myself. I made the grand gesture. I quit IT, moved across the country, started a new life. I promised myself when I did that I was going to find something that made me happy, I wanted to do something I believed in. Now that I'm here, far from the comfort zone of working a job I actively dislike, I guess it's time to find out if I'm the kind of person who can love what they do.
I need to remember that when I look back on this, it's going to have been one big adventure. I just need to keep my perspective on it, and not let the day-to-day living wear me out.
Posted by Ben Corman at 9:33 AM