The Traveling Savage

That’s me looking over Vancouver harbour with the lights of downtown peaking over my shoulder. I’m in my early 30s, and I recently quit my lucrative desk job in the dairy state. Things were miraculously “good” by most common definitions of the term. I live with a loving and beautiful wife. I have a nice new house in a nice neighborhood. I spend far too much time doing yard work. I have LCD HDTVs and all kinds of music equipment and video game systems and mechanized yard implements. I also had an amazing vacuum of spirit. I had a revelation.

I was cowering beneath the covers.

I was a complicit zombie.

I was executing the internal dissent.

I was willfully choosing blindness.

Every minute was invisibly burdened by a shroud of worry. The life was lavish and lazy and full up with things weightier than any ship’s anchor if I’d taken the time to notice the pull or the gradual slouch creeping into my posture. There was no destination and no path, just one foot in front of the other. Waking up; driving to work; eating lunch; watching TV; going to bed. And rinse and repeat. And repeat. At times, in the belly of the night or after a soul-sucking day, discussions would cast a passing light on the bars of this insidious cage. Innumerable life-altering epiphanies fled during those nights, no match for the daily cycle.

And then one frigid December night everything tipped over.

The responsibilities and routines and reasons scattered like bugs from beneath a rock. They looked as minuscule and ugly as bugs, too. The feeling? Like catching up on all the sleep you’ve lost over the course of your life or the sudden unlatching of a Succubus from your mind. It was levitation. It was levity.

It might sound over-dramatic, but there is drama in a man finding the key to a cell that for years he’s called life. Time will be the storyteller of what lies beyond these familiar confines. But I am awake.

I am clear-eyed and brimming.

I am the me I wanted to be.

I am holding the key. Come along with me.