It was already well after 8:00 p.m. when Dad arrived to bring me to Columbus. Add the time it took to load up his van and subsequently stop for a bite to eat and it was closer to 10:00 by the time we left Ann Arbor. There is something about driving late at night on evenings of great consequence that puts me in a somber, reflective mood that seems to create moments that etch themselves indelibly on my memory. Dad and I talked of many things on that journey to the city I'd left just over two years before, of religion and politics, of family and friends, of sports and leisure and memories shared, hopes, dreams, future, past and present. Out of all that conversation I remember one line particularly. We had been discussing what part of Columbus I was moving to, which just happened to be a scant few blocks away from where I had lived when I was 20 just after my freshman year at Ohio State. A brief, contemplative silence followed, and finally Dad said:
“You really took the long road home, didn't you?”
It will be hard for the reader to immediately grasp the cacophony of emotions that little sentence aroused in me. Out loud I laughed, but inside was a turmoil of frustration, relief, happiness and loss. “Home” is a place of a million million memories. Friends, family and little sacred places occupy their fair share of those memories, but many others are not so nostalgic. There are the memories of feeling trapped in my home town as a teenager, wanting nothing more than to see the world; memories of feeling lost and without hope as I dropped out of Ohio State, no freedom in sight and a mountain of debt crushing down ever more heavily on my shoulders; memories of long, lonesome midnight walks where I would imagine myself never turning back, just disappearing into the distance.
I was returning to my friends and family, yes, and no adventure out in the great wide world will ever mean quite as much to me as my parents, sisters and old friends. But I was also returning only because of lost dreams – the dream of law school and the dream of teaching in Korea. I was going from the freedom of the outside world where the sky was the limit and no wish seemed unattainable to the place where years ago I had felt like I might never escape either the physical confines of my home or the metaphorical grasp of debt and powerlessness.
Nearly two months have gone by since Dad said those words, but I have thought of them often since. The mixture of feelings they first elicited continues to this day. For the first time in years I have two things I have not had in a long, long time: regular visits with old friends and family, as well as the freedom that comes from not working and going to class simultaneously. It is hard for me to say just how much joy I have derived from both these things. I have read quite a few books, written distant friends, started writing several stories, practiced guitar almost every day, made new friends and enjoyed a number of great impromptu conversations with my duplex neighbors who share our porch. All these things feed my soul and in a way I feel more nourished in these past two months than I had for years before.
Yet, at the same time I have experienced the frustration of holding a 40-hour/week job that has nothing to do with my dreams and I face the prospect of paying off debts. Moreover, I have found that the responsibilities of adult life prevent many of my friends, who are not as free as I am, from socializing and conversing as often as I'd like. I am, then, largely happy and much of my time is filled with rewarding pursuits that give me a deep, abiding satisfaction, but at the same time I am not cut out to live this life forever. Living in Ohio, sacrificing half my waking life to a job whose best quality is that it is not miserable is not my idea of happiness. I am a Dreamer, and Dreamers cannot be content without following their dreams.
I am also a Wanderer, and Wanderers cannot be content. Now, you may have expected that sentence to end with the clause “without wandering,” but the nature of the Wanderer itself is paradoxical. Wanderers have to wander or they'll be frustrated and stifled by the stationary life, which does not satisfy them in the slightest. However, the activity of wandering is a transient, difficult lifestyle filled with temporary connections to people soon left behind and a complete lack of anything that can truly be called “home.” Such a lifestyle is largely antithetical to contentment. So it seems that, stay or go, the Wanderer is doomed to a life of discontent.
The English language is a muddled contraption of synonyms, homonyms, antonyms and whatever other kinds of nyms you can think of. Words like “content” are used to describe any one of a vast array of feelings, ranging from eating homemade ice cream surrounded by friends and family on the 4th of July without a care in the world to being perfectly happy to live in Alexandria, MN for the rest of one's life. The 4th of July kind of contentment is the feeling that all is right in the world at that moment, while the resolution of living out one's days in Alexandria indicates that one is all right with one's current life and has no particular desire to change it any time soon. Both are feelings of contentment.
For the Wanderer, the latter feeling – staying in one place for the rest of one's days – is utterly foreign. The Wanderer, who could just as rightly be called the Explorer, feels the constant compulsion to do something new: to learn a new language, pick up a new instrument, read a new book, see a new place, experience something beyond everyday life. However, the 4th of July kind of contentment – the feeling that all is right in the universe – is just as possible for the Wanderer as it is for the 76 year-old man who has lived in Alexandria his whole life and who currently occupies a bench at an idyllic park eating a decadent, towering waffle cone of cookie dough ice cream surrounded by his flawless, successful family with the sun beaming graciously down on him like the smile of God himself.
The contentment I seek is not the contentment of a steady place and setting, but rather the contentment of the soul. It is a contentment to which there are many roads, no two of which are the same for any two individuals, and it does not require one to settle down in one place for all time. Thank God. I would argue it is by far the more important of the two kinds of contentment. Anyway, I've just argued it's the only kind available to me, so I'll take what I can get.
Which leads to the obvious question: Whither leads Dave's next path, if he is so stubbornly determined to ship off around the world and so obstinately and long-windedly convinced he cannot be happy without “wandering” or “exploring” or whatever he wants to call it?
Well, we shall see, shan't we?
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