The Vision and Waking-up to the Possibilities
/“Transcendental Travel” as an idea, as a concept, represented how I’ve been traveling for years, both as a solo traveler and with my family. Immersive travel experiences that energized me, inspired me, and fueled future dreams were something I made happen yearly. There was always a desire to take it further and to do more, and I was open to the possibilities of what that meant.
The rinse-and-repeat nature and the corporate “system” increasingly got in the way. The trajectory of what I was doing daily seemed to diverge more and more from what energized me. The following quote from Alan Watts really drove the point home for me. He wrote,
“This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
“Play,” a perceived luxury most people don’t give themselves permission to think about, let alone go after. This is further embodied in a great Alan Watts talk where he poses the question and his answer.
“What would you like to do if money was no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?” He goes on to say, “When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time.”
In the months preceding my 50th birthday, I thought deeply about what that next phase of life would look like. It was more than taking trips to distant places. I wanted to make the time, while I had the time, to slow time down, and live each moment more fully. I was going to make a journey to explore the world around us in an effort to connect to people, places, and my Higher Self. To be realized, grand visions and plans, need to focus on the “doing of it.” Metaphorically and specifically, where the rubber meets the road.
The vision is to spend 50 days on the road at 50 years old. It’s my grand experiment and a journey across North America on a motorcycle discovering the “Best Version” of who I am, connecting with people, places, and my Higher Self. An overland motorcycle journey and a journey of self-discovery. My objectives don’t have many constraints. I’m traveling from Florida to the West Coast of the United States and back within 50 days. There’s no a firm plan, free to explore, and no real deadlines each day. I really want to let go of some of life’s “baggage,” to lighten the load, to live in the moment and to connect with people and places along the way. To simply enjoy being on the bike, seeing the sights, and accepting what comes. I’m holding tight to what John Steinbeck wrote and taking it to heart.
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
The feeling I want to sustain and the goal I seek to realize, is to live a life of purpose. To be alive in the world. The Jackson Browne song, “Alive in the World,” underlines and captures, the emotion that’s surfaced in me:
“To open my eyes and wake up alive in the world
To open my eyes and fully arrive in the world
With its beauty and its cruelty
With its heartbreak and its joy
With it constantly giving birth to life and to forces that destroy
And the infinite power of change
Alive in the world”
A story of hope. A journey of the soul.