During many long walks on cold nights I remember proclaiming to drewbaca_ on long walks that I feel no sense of loss in the fact that I spend so much time away from my parents.
"You and I are on journeys. Sure we love our families, but if we spent all our time with them because we loved them they wouldn't like that either. They know we have missions, they want us to take them. Can you imagine if
Frodo
just stayed at The Shire?"
I don't know how many times I brought this spiel up, but it made me feel really good about hardly seeing my family. I had a journey.
Nearly all my twenties was spent on this gung-ho focus on a journey oriented life. I loved this idea of living a life dedicated towards a journey. I looked down on more grounded people who weren't "journeying". To a younger me the only point of life was to journey and grow.
A
journey
is that which takes you away from your roots and puts you through immense character altering pressure. The alteration is neither guaranteed to be good or bad. There is no good or bad. Just change.
What I loved about having those talks with Drew back then was that we were both in the same boat in regards to how we perceived journey vs grounding. Now what I've loved about my talks with Will this past year was how opposite we are in viewing them.
He is a man leaving the town. I am the man arriving.
drewbaca_
William Liao
