Life seems to haunt us with lessons we are not prepared to meet with grace or the passion often required to rise to the occasion. How so? How can passion and haunting lessons be mixed together in the same sentence? It should be no surprise to any of you that lessons are there for our own benefit, otherwise we'd call them something else, like tragedies. But what could be more tragic than a life without lessons? A life devoid of growth? Such things do exist, and never so much as now, for at the same time we are capable of living lives devoid of choice, following a prescription that one facet of society or culture has set, we are also creating machines with unchangeable programming that act in our world, changing it as programmed. Yet we are not so perfectly static as them, not yet. Our programs can change the moment we recognize them as merely that and chose a different way.
Chapter 8: The Cult of One
I have to admit it took me a good while to get the hang of traveling alone. It sounds strange to me even to say it, since traveling is what changed my life so completely as a young boy traveling the world with my family, and then flying alone to Europe in 2000 with nothing but a backpack and my skateboard. Though I was surrounded by relatives then, my German was less than functional. I was simply good at nodding my head and sharing the same reactions as those talking to me in order to get by. How easy it is for people to assume their reaching you, when they are not, and vice versa. Yet those experiences allowed my mind to expand well beyond those of my peers, as my dirty little secret allowed me to be everywhere, with everyone, and yet in a world of my own, a permanent growth cycle set outside of those around me. I had never been one to follow others in the classical sense, but I joined them in what they were doing, so long as it did not conflict with my values.