It makes sense that anyone who travels for an extended period of time spends a lot of it decompressing. This could take the form of an extended, multi-day drunk, several consecutive days on the beach ignoring client emails, bills, etc., or just a few extra naps scattered throughout the day. Some days, it’s all of it at once. We all need to remove ourselves from insanely stressful patterns, and vacations are always nice, but there comes a point for many where the travel needs to be longer, more in-depth, more than just a week at an all-inclusive resort. We need to perform a deeper shedding.
What are we shedding, anyway, when we’re off on the road? Also, and maybe more importantly, what is it that needs to be shed? We can only answer for ourselves, but after the travel fatigue wears off and we have drunk and started to eat our way through a new location, we find more time to ask ourselves the deeper questions. After all, the human body can only process so many liters of tequila (yes, even the nineteen-year-old body has to rest, and I’m no longer nineteen.)
I find myself in a clear process of shedding, where layers flake off every day and fall on the floor. Little pieces of me blow away in the wind or get swept up by a broom, and the funny thing is when I look at these little chunks of dried skin and flesh and ideas I do not recognize them; they are not me any more, and I wonder if they ever were.
Eastern spiritual traditions liken the process of enlightenment, or whatever a tradition calls deeper attainment, to the peeling of an onion, with layers of skin falling off as one forgives, and relaxes on a beach, and meditates, and indulges in a little bit of mezcal, and relaxes on a beach, and meditates some more, and does a nice, stretchy-bendy yoga practice, and forgives a few more people, and hits a beachfront restaurant for ceviche in the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, you know, does things. The onion skin represents the Ego,our false sense of self that we race through this lifetime defining and defending against all comers.
False sense? Yeah, false. It’s part of what you might realize when you travel. It may take the form of a question, such as “What the hell am I really doing in my life?” Maybe it is, “What the fuck am I doing in this shit-eating job?” You know, it could be profane, after all the peeling of layers has to force some honesty. The more I travel personally, the more I realize that we hit the road to become who we are, and for me that has meant a great deal of shedding.
No, it hasn’t been pounds (at least not yet–think mounds of ceviche, guacamole, fresh tortillas, chips, and beer.) What I am shedding instead are things you can’t see. You can see their manifestation in the form of gray hairs, wrinkles, and furrowed brows, but you can’t point out the things themselves. We made them with our minds.
I am talking about our concepts, our fancy little labels that we hang on ourselves. Even while invisible, they are so heavy they drag us down to the earth, then underneath it, where it’s really difficult to breathe for all the pebbles and worms start crawling into our eyes. Yep, that’s right–they kill us. We let them.
How often have you defined yourself based on how you make a living? Maybe four of five times today? More? Okay, now we’re really being honest. This happens all the time. I used to tell myself that I was a “mediator.” That may have been how I spent several hours each day, but was it really me? Even if it wasn’t, I made it so. It was a convenient definition, and it even paid well. That can make the label even heavier, more cumbersome to haul around.
We do this to ourselves constantly, and in our crazed society we are encouraged to keep it up. Yep, worker bee, define yourself based on how you’re paying the rent–or not paying it. Define yourself and restrict yourself to that category, because that’s who you are, little worker bee, this is your life, you sick twisted fuck, this is your identity. We are encouraged to yoke ourselves in this fashion, and we do it. We all do it; I sure as hell did (look, that’s what happens when you’re dumb enough to go to law school.) Along with this definition, we add a glorification of busy-ness as a status symbol, ensuring we are always running around looking busy, feeling like productive members of society, accomplishing something, but if we stop the frenzy–which we are never encouraged to–it’s pretty clear that our cherished accomplishments take the form of a bill for our therapist, maybe our next round of antidepressants. Do we always have to make it look like we’re doing something? Does it always have to be something our peers might see as “productive?” Also, why we do we give them such authority to judge us?
What the hell might happen if you took a mental health day and sat on the couch reading a good novel? What if you took three mental health days? Thirty? Three hundred? Would you look like less of a human being in the eyes of your mythical peers? Really? You think so? I disagree. I’ll bet they’d be jealous.
So I find myself down here doing the work, peeling off the layers, the labels, the harried toxicity of modern life. Of course I am still working and making money, but I can promise you it’s not the only thing I’m doing. We have so much more to be, and to do–or not do. That is important, after all; what we don’t do matters. Once we quit racing around like a coked-out fiend, the whole world opens up. We can live without our labels. You see, I am still breathing, and it is 11:46 AM, Mountain Time, if you must know. I am getting hungry, and feel like obeying the call of my organism to walk the one block over to the beach, to my favorite seafood restaurant. I still have some layers of skin to shed. Better keep at it.