“Strong longing for or impulse toward wandering” – Merriam Webster Dictionary

Dear reader, this is the beginning of a four-part series based around the expansion of the mind and the cravings we feel during out lives. It will hold personal beliefs, view-points, understandings, and concepts.  I had the idea for this series after writing my intro to this blog and talking about the fact that I move/moved around a lot.  I wanted to delve into that and see where it takes us.

The first topic is Wanderlust, obviously.  I thought I would start here because it’s the least abstract of the four. You’ll see what I mean later. I put the definition at the forefront of this entry because this is the only one of the four that has a concrete definition and I’m hoping that it will be a foundation to guide us as we start this journey.

So here we go:

For as long as I can remember I’ve been uncomfortable.  By uncomfortable I mean out of place, shaken or unsteady.  Throughout my childhood, and continuing into my young-adulthood, I have been moving from state to state. Not emotionally, physically. And, to be fair, emotionally.

This started when I was four and my family picked up and moved from a collection of quiet towns in Illinois to an island suburb on Kauai, Hawaii.   I do not remember this move, nor do I find myself capable of fathoming the difficulties my parents faced with their own displacement with four children in tow.  But we made a life, and my first memories are a jumble of Spam and Ramen, sand in my bathing suit, and salt water up my nose. Along with one particularly jarring jellyfish sting.

For some, seven years is a long time.  For a dog, half a life-time.  For a fly, an eternity. For my parents, it was a deadline.  After seven long years (I use long here for emphasis and no other reason) we lived on an island paradise a block from the sea, where I, being white, was a minority and the garden was filled with papayas and mangos.

After seven-years in Hawaii we moved again.  This time to Georgia.  I have nothing good to say about my time in Georgia other than the fact that it lasted eighteen short months and we left. To New Mexico.

I met my best friend in New Mexico.  I kissed a girl for the first time in New Mexico.  I lived through most of High School in New Mexico.  It was in New Mexico that I felt the closest to comfortable that I have ever been. Naturally, that couldn’t last, and after five short years, we picked up, again, and slid our way to South Carolina for my senior year.  And as soon as I could I made my way back to New Mexico, where I would attend college.

I’m sorry, reader, that this feels like an outline of my short life.  I’m trying to get to the point of this first topic. The point of this outline, and how it relates to the theme, is that throughout my life I thought I was forced to move away from friends and family and loved ones and everyone in between. Then I graduated college.

When I walked on stage and took that rolled bit of paper that said “diploma will come in the mail” I felt, for the first time, uninhibited. Or maybe unchained? Either way, a weight that I had been feeling for my entire life had been lifted.  I no longer had my parents to tell me where to go next.  I didn’t have to stay in New Mexico.  My business finished there with that promise that I would get a “job well done” in the mail.  And reader, it scared the shit out of me.  I suddenly felt that I would float away if I didn’t find something, anything, to ground myself on.

I chose the source of my misery.  Illinois.  I moved back to where it all started to find a new birth, or something equally symbolic.  What I found was death.  Something completely unexpected. Not my own death, my grandmother’s. She had cancer and I happened to end up in the exact right place to take care of her and play music for her and buy her ice cream before she left us all forever.  I think that’s where my realization started.  Not a full-blown epiphany, but a strong sense of “oh, this might be how things work”.

I was pulled to Texas next, where I found my sister again, and I found a new purpose.  And for a while everything made sense. It could be attributed to the fact that I didn’t have to choose, not really.  I knew exactly where I needed to be.

After a time, a little over a year, I began to feel like I would be missing out on something big if I stayed in Dallas any longer.  I had friends, a girlfriend, a couple of jobs, and a place to call my own.  In terms of life goals, I had accomplished a lot. But the goals I had accomplished weren’t mine.  They were someone else’s.  So that’s why when my dad asked if I wanted to move to ALASKA I said, let’s do it. Honestly, I’m not summarizing or simplifying.  There was never a thought about how difficult it would be or what I would do there or what I would be leaving behind.  By this time I had developed a true Wanderlust.

There it is.  There’s our theme.

Driving across the United States from Dallas, TX to Columbia, SC then all the way up to North Dakota, through Canada, into Skagway and the ferry trip through the Gastineau Channel into Juneau, AK is my second greatest experience. The first is my solo trip to London, England. More on that to come.

I had a second realization as I drove the seventy-two hours from Texas to Juneau. I had fallen in love with traveling. I fell in love with talking to people I didn’t know.  I fell in love with the idea of discovering the unknown.  And uprooting my life and saying goodbye to a few friends seemed to be a small price to pay.  Especially now that we have Facebook.

I’m sure there are people out there that can relate to my story. I’m sure there are other Wanderlusters out there.  We are people who jump first and ask questions later.

I read once that the comic book superhero Daredevil leaps from buildings, and instead of planning his path from fire escape to lamp post to survival on the pavement below before he jumps, he plans his route down as he falls.  I can relate to this so hard. I don’t jump off of buildings, but every time I find myself needing a change, I leap before I look.  The move from Dallas to Juneau was a small leap.  I had family to stay with when I got there.  I had a cushion to land on.  But this last move, from Juneau to California. That one was a leap of faith in myself.  The first leap of faith that I had no one to depend upon byt myself. And I loved it.  As soon as I decided to move I tried like a maniac to then put everything together.  Some things came together. Other things didn’t and I’m working on picking up the pieces.

But that’s part of the experience.  That’s part of lusting after wander. Desiring new places and new people shouldn’t come with a giant safety net and it shouldn’t be found sitting on your couch. And sometimes when you need to find a new place to call home, or a new place to sleep for a while, you’ll have to pick up those pieces.  Most the time you’ll do it alone.

That’s another lesson I’ve picked up.  An important one that I will try to elaborate on, but honestly I don’t think I will do it justice. You can’t lust after more that one thing, and if you lust after wandering the world, you’ll have to lust after other things, or people, some other time. This life comes with a lot of choices.  I thought I could choose to lust after people, but it’s a lot easier to lust after places.

This is a rough intro to much more. The other three topics I want to touch on will clear some of this up, but I think we got a nice start.  And I hope you think so, too.