Life From A Backpack: Something In The Way

Exterior intro:  After a long break I have returned! It feels so good to be back and active. I must admit that I have been very much missing these posts.

Quite a bit have happened since I last posted and I would like to begin a series of posts that delineate what has been going on and the personal growth that I feel I have experienced. There are many things in this world that I do not know, but if there is one thing that I do, it is that life is an entity, not an experience.

Thanks for sticking with me in this time of silence.

Chris

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Hey Gang!

When I was younger, around 18 or so, I had dreams of just going. No place in particular, just go. I dreamed of meeting beautiful people and seeing beautiful things. I dreamed of warm days standing in a grassy area where there was no one except me and a few people I have met along the way. This place that we found, seemingly untouched. This ethereal realm where life stands still yet blows through the grass. It hides beneath our feet as ants and insects carry on their lives. So much would be happening in such a quiet place. That was my dream.

I was walking around Barnes & Noble back then and I felt like I was going nowhere. I was 19 and had no prospects. I thought that I could not afford schooling and the job market was terrible. I had yet to be humbled enough to take a job at a fast food restaurant. That melancholy was bitter and I was thrust into a deep depression. I put blankets over my window and slept for hours. It was a bedroom but also a tomb. My own prison built by me, for me.

I looked around the book store and finally saw it; a book titled “Europe From A Backpack.” It was like a beacon sent just for me. I was amazed at how it fit in line with my idea of freedom. That wanderer spirit that was being held in captivity far beneath. I bought the book and read it cover to cover. It was a series of essays by travel writers. People whom did it as a hobby and not a job. They were also students, teachers, and business professionals. They were from different walks of life but brought together by one aspect of life that seems to have joined them together. This one thing that only they would understand. I was on the outside of an ocean looking in. I wanted in there. I wanted to be part of it.

Years passed and I never got to go. I took drives around neighboring states but i still had never seen that ethereal plain.

You see, I began to grow up. I began to do things but life got in the way. I went to college but stopped because I could not afford it. So, I got a job as a security job to pay off my tuition. I wanted to move out but I had no job. My friends moved on and I was stagnant. I wanted to do these events, these hurdles to be jumped, but life always got in the way. Something always happened to take me away from what I loved to do.

I still move ahead.

Years have come since then and my friends are further away than ever. I see my mother with health problems and I watch as my family disintegrates. I see loved ones fall. I watch flowers bloom and die and it is tragic.

I watch others getting married and moving away and I see those pictures on Facebook that taunt me; something inside me knocks against my body’s walls whenever this happens. This is another unknown. I wish I knew what it was but I do not.

Oscar Wilde once famously said, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

I think about this and my own life. I think life was wasted on my youth. I was born on Friday and died on Sunday only to be resurrected. This was my life for a long time.

Now, I have so much life to live but there is something blocking it. Something in the way.

Teaching is amazing but it is hard to do when coupled with school. It feels like it all is just one big day. My creativity is stifled and admittedly so by most of my professors. I wake up and fall asleep with one identity. One mask.

Life is outside of my window yet most of the light I see is phosphorous gas inside of a tube.

Something is in the way that I need to break free from. I need to meet life again instead of being chained to these events. I no longer find Friday and Sunday my days of death and resurrection. Now, I am alive but not living. I still think of the ethereal realm every day but I also think of Life, with a capital L.

Life is a thing, not a something. It lives and breathes. It is something tangible and speaks to all of us. Maybe that is what knocks.

Maybe Life is where that grassy place is. It waits to be found. After all of these events that barricade the way to Life, I hope to find it.

Life will be found when I finally clear all of those somethings in the way.

– Chris

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