When I was a kid I had terrible taste in video games. And thank God I did because otherwise I would have fallen into a niche or relied on other people to tell me what to like.  As most ten-year-olds did, I had my impressionable qualities and I did adopt certain interests from my older brothers and my friends at the time.  But, that’s not to say I didn’t develop my own ideas of what was good. And it was those ideas that stuck around well into my twenties.

I just threw a pretty vague idea at you.  Sorry about that, reader, but don’t run away screaming just yet, I’m about to make this a lot clearer.

Nostalgia is a huge part of who we are, a huge part of who I am.  Things that I liked in the past are now defining characteristics of who I am today. Take for instance Banjo-Kazooie. This game is the first game that I remember playing, and it’s often the game my dad refers back to when we talk about my childhood.  For hours we would sit together and I would play and he would joke about never getting a turn.  I don’t remember beating the final boss or collecting all of the Jiggies, but I do remember the sense of adventure that came with the game. Ah, now we’re in familiar territory.  If you’ve read anything else on my blog, you might have realized that this kid talks about adventure and discovery a lot. It’s true.

Now, when I say I had terrible taste in video games when I was a kid, I don’t mean that Banjo-Kazooie was a bad game, I just mean that it wasn’t the popular choice in my neighborhood.  The taste I had in games didn’t fit those around me, and I didn’t realize that that wasn’t such a bad thing at the time, so I assumed that I just had bad taste. However, that fact only made me like the game all the more. I liked being the only one on the adventure or, even better, I loved being able to share the experience with only my dad.

Today it is so easy to find and play a game from our childhood. Even buying a current game is so much easier when you consider digital downloads, the abundance of stores that specialize in video games, and shopping online, but when I was ten things were a bit more complicated.  If you wanted to play a game, you had to work for it. Every so often I would come across money for a game which at $50 had been an astronomical amount for me to just come across.  I would usually find myself waiting for Christmas or a birthday to come around so I could buy the game I had been pining over for months. It hurt, a deep emotional hurt, to have to wait for the game to hit the shelves, then wait again for the time I could afford it or ask for it. That’s a lot of strain on a small child’s emotions.

Then, when that moment came, when I finally set out on that journey up to the peak of Spiral Mountain, the sense of adventure took over. I didn’t see a set of pixels on a screen, I didn’t hear recordings of music played back through the crappy speakers on our convex television. No, I felt the grass between my toes, I salivated at taste honeycombs, I could smell the belches coming from Captain Blubber.  And the music, let’s just say, if my mind falls into that vacant sort of drift off mode we all fall into from time to time, then I often find myself humming Grant Kirkope’s Spiral Mountain theme.

While my brother’s played WWC wrestling or Halo or Half-Life, which don’t get me wrong are all great games, I would wait and wait for my turn on the television so that I could slap in my copy of Donkey Kong 64 or Banjo-Kazooie and explore and discover and get lost in an adventure all my own.  I’m not trying to build bridges where there aren’t any, but I could definitely make a solid attempt at blaming my drive to see new places and meet new people on the games that entertained me as a child.  For me, the idea that there might be my own Spiral Mountain hiding in the woods in Oregon or a Donkey Kong Island off the coast of Florida gives me such pleasure. And the fact that those things might be there and I might be missing out on them, that kills me.

I have a recent example of this.

When I was eleven or twelve I picked up Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. I’d just come back from watching Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone in the theater and I craved more of the wizarding world.  Thus started my obsession with The Boy Who Lived. That’s right Potterheads, I started with book 2.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, this would later be my drive to take a solo trip to London in my mid-twenties.  The first time I am able to go out on my own, cross an ocean and make the world a smaller place for myself, and I choose a place that has deep roots in my childhood.  Now, I knew that London would have some connection to Harry Potter when I bought the tickets, I even knew that there were tours around the city to take people to sites specifically related to the stories.  The fact that I knew all this was over-shadowed, though. While I planned the trip I had fooled myself into thinking that I had picked London for much more logical reasons:  They spoke the language, the currency was relatively easy to understand, the people don’t hate Americans and the food would be close to what I thought food should be.  This was to be the first step out into the world, nothing more than a gateway to more adventures.  I wanted to take it easy, slide into the pool inch by inch rather than dive into the deep-end.

So that’s what I told myself. And maybe I didn’t know it at the time of planning the trip, but I figured it out really quick when I set foot in King’s Cross Station for the first time. When I caught site of the platforms and the trains and the people I knew right then that I had come all this way just to get closer to what I loved since I was a child, and closer to my childhood self. And all I can tell you now is that I don’t regret a moment of it.  I don’t regret the money I spent on the plane ticket, and I don’t regret letting my ticket to Matilda the Musical go to waste so I could get last minute tickets to The Cursed Child Part one and two.

I’ll tell you one thing, reader.  Feeding my nostalgia with trips to far off destinations felt good and it helped me accomplish something that I never thought I would need to accomplish.  It made me feel valid. Those adventures I went on with Banjo and Harry as a kid through books and in games made me feel great, but because my older brother’s didn’t like them or some of the people I hung around with laughed at me or at the idea of a talking bear or a boy wizard, that feeling seemed to be paired with another feeling: Ignorance.  I felt ignorant of the world. I felt that other people understood the way things worked better than I did.  I began to think that the adventures I believed in were childish and immature and that I would eventually have to grow out of them.

Feeding my nostalgia by exploring the grass fields over a small mountain, ducking into a cave on the side of a valley or walking down the streets of London, that took all those negative feelings away.  I realized again what I had seen as a child. I saw the adventure.

The truth is, I had lost something in the years that passed since first playing Banjo-Kazooie or seeing Daniel Radcliffe pick up the wand in Ollivander’s.  I had lost the feeling of exploration and excitement of setting out on a journey.  It slipped away somewhere during high school and got buried by an adult job.  Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve found it again.  I found the adventure when I followed the steps of Harry and I’m sure that if I ever find my own Spiral Mountain I’ll sit back and let the music flow through me completely at peace and ready for anything.

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality, nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit.”

• Christopher McCandless

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

• JRR Tolkien

At this point in my series on Wonder and Wander I’ve reached some conclusions about drifting off into the world with a sense of acceptance and understanding and getting lost in new concepts and ideas and religions and loves.

I know you didn’t expect to reach part four, reader, and find a sum-it-up conclusion of the first three parts. Sorry about that. But it’s over now, and we can move on.

Let’s start with the first idea I bring up in the quote above. Back when I read Into The Wild I felt that the author spent a lot of time idolizing a young man who chose to abandon his life and find a new one with fewer constrictions. The author, Jon Krakauer, envied the spirit of McCandless and his call to adventure. Krakauer tried to force a number of ties between himself and his subject and those ties are what he expanded on through the book.  I picked the book up to read about McCandless, himself, and instead found a kind of love letter.  In truth, I could relate more to the author of this book than the subject. I felt that same envy toward McCandless and his daring escape from our society. I wanted to wander off into the wild and leave this secure life behind. The only problem was I really didn’t care what kind of adventure Krakauer had gone off on or the type of life-risking adventuring he’d committed to. 

In all actuality I would never abandon my home, my family, my doctors and bank account. I feel safe and secure with those things, just as McCandless tells me I do.  This criticism of my life makes me feel naïve, or like I don’t really know what to do so I just do what everyone else is doing.  I conform.  Everyone else feels safe with a job and a car, so I do, too. And I’m sure that this is damaging to my adventurous spirit. But I’m not as big of a risk-taker as Krakauer.

That being said, the best way that I have found to replenish my adventurous spirit is to lose myself in my surroundings. That’s much easier, and safer. And this is what I want to share with you, reader.  Sometimes, when life is busy and hard and noisy, it’s refreshing to wander off and get lost.  What I mean here is, I try to go without a map.

Take for instance my trip to San Diego this past May. I found a nice little place to stay near the Gaslamp district, close to a main road, and within earshot of the ocean.  This, for me, was a great way to get lost.  We had landmarks, general sense of direction and if need be, we could ask for directions. 

Ah, right there, another perk of traveling without a map.  You meet so many great people when you ask for directions.  The best thing about asking for directions is it’s a great way to break the ice.  I met a terrific woman on this trip by asking her about the San Diego Zoo.

I know what you’re thinking: Getting lost near the main road isn’t really getting lost. Well, stick with me for a moment and we’ll get beyond that thought together.

On our second morning of this trip, my friend and I wandered off in the general direction of downtown in hopes of finding breakfast.  After about forty minutes we wound up in a busy area and hopelessly lost.  Before I could start looking for a landmark or a street sign or grab at anything that would help us get our bearings, my friend had her phone out and started typing away, Googling the location of the restaurant in relation to her GPS on her phone.

This frustrated me. Here I was, an explorer in a new world, and someone was trying to give me a path to follow, a set of goals to achieve, a crayon to color inside the lines with. This frustrated me because I have for a long time now firmly believed that the journey is the point, not the destination.  Cliché, I know. But it’s so true.

At the time I was trying to be nice, and I told her to give me five more minutes before we resort to looking it up. And I found the place.  In those five minutes I actually found the exact restaurant that we had been searching for. And that, that was the greatest sense of accomplishment. We got lost, we used our wits, we didn’t succumb to the evil that is the map of someone else’s journey, and we reached our destination alive!  And the sense of accomplishment overwhelmed me and I truly believe that the breakfast we ate that morning was all the better for it.

Let’s touch on Tolkien here.  The reason I picked the quote above was mainly for the second line, “Not all those who wander are lost”, but then I read the rest of the poem and found sense in the lines around the one I needed.  I do believe that Tolkien had a great sense of adventure.  I mean, you kind’ve have to if you’re going to write Lord of The Rings. What I believe this excerpt from his poem that gains its title from the first line means is that nothing is truly as it appears.

At first glance, the streets of San Diego seem to be a puzzling spatter of lines on a page, but when you get to them, you really find the adventure they offer.  The smells, the tastes, the accents and stories. And the same went for the streets of London when I visited there, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Madrid, Juneau, Dallas, the list goes on and on. 

Speaking of Dallas. When I lived there I dated a girl who used her car’s GPS everywhere she went. She’d been there for nearly her entire life, going on twenty-seven years.  The thing of it is, when she turned the GPS off, which rarely happened, she’d become lost. I spent just over a year in that city and by the end of it I knew the streets better than she ever had, ever would probably. 

At first glance, a map seems like a godsend, something to save us from hurtling off into the night and never being heard from again.  Upon closer inspection, the map, the GPS, the phones that tell us to “make the next legal U-turn” have only a crippling effect.  In this technologically evolved age we are dependent on machines and satellites to tell us where to go and how to go there. We are being drained of our sense of adventure.  I’m being drained of my sense of adventure.  It’s in our roots, our heritage and our generations of experience we gain through family stories, to travel. We have found our way over continents and oceans, through countless storms and beyond too many horizons to just give up now.  It’s the deep roots that are not reached by the frost.  Well, I believe that the frost is coming, and we need to find our roots before they’re lost for good.  Because it’s through these roots that we gain our strength and without them, we’re going to wither.

When I am old, I want to be able to tell my family that I lived a good life and I got lost a whole lot, but I always found my way home.  I want to tell them of the dragons and goblins I fought, I want to tell them about the princesses that I met and the orcs that tried to steal them away from me. I want adventure in my life, reader, and I want that for you, too.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am no Chris McCandless.  Although, I did spend a year in Alaska, and I do tend to wander off from time to time.  I promise, reader, this is not a love letter.

The reason I started this four-part series on Wander and Wonder was because it’s an important subject to me. I love to encourage people to think for themselves, live outside the guidebook of life, take on challenges that might help them grow. That’s why I have written so extensively trying to encourage you to walk around, get lost, meet some new people, get lost with them.  Try new things whenever you can. Eat food that’s against your religion, fight for what you believe rather than what you’re told to believe. It’s your life, not anyone else’s and no one should tell you how you should be doing it. You always have a choice and you always have the option. Try not to get fooled into believing you are stuck in your unhappy circumstances. But it is up to you.  Take the initiative, because I can’t do it for you.

That’s about it, I guess. I want to thank you for reading. You’re really fantastic to make it all the way through my theories and ideas, and I hope you found some encouragement in my words.

Until next time, reader.

You have to be happy that you had the chance to know her. It’s an odd feeling.  Never again will you be able to say her name to her the way you used to and see her eyes light up.  There’s no hope in that ever happening again.  Ever.  Your memories are cold now, too.  The once warm touch of her palm on your chest or her cheek on your cheek, that’s a long time ago.  That’s something that has been sitting out for quite some time.  Stale.  Cold. There’s a spark in those memories, but barely enough to bring a tiny bit of light to a very dark night.  One of those nights when you go to bed hungry because you’re too tired to fix dinner, and your pillow has been laying on the floor all afternoon so it’s plumped in an uncomfortable shape, and the sheets have turned sideways and the bathroom door creeks and moans in the breeze crafted by the overhead fan.  On those nights, her face is a bit stronger in your mind.  You can count the freckles on her nose again, and see the area where her eyes go from blue to grey.  The bounce in her bangs when she laughed her boisterous, low laugh.  You welcome those nights.  Those ideas that were once a person.  The taste of alcohol on her breath in a deep kiss.  Nothing beat that taste, so you try to trick yourself into tasting it again.  Trying to reheat a cold memory.  Bring life to a…

But it does matter?  They’re not wrong, you shouldn’t spend the rest of your life dwelling. It’s not a great way to become what you want to be.  A dwelling. A Basic and lifeless thing balancing on the cusp of creation and death.  Soon you will be dead and you will have spent too much time thinking about someone other than yourself.  But there’s the thing.  Too much time thinking about others?  Isn’t that what your mom always told you to do?  Think of others?  Spend more time thinking of others than thinking of yourself?  Treat others the way you want to be treated.  That’s what my mom told me.  She told me to think how others want to be treated and treat them that way so they will treat you the same.  Well, I want to be thought of.  All the time.  Loved, wanted, and thought of.  So why can’t I put all my energy into one person, maybe two if I have one in the spotlight at a time.  One off to the side, unfairly…  It’s not unfair.  It’s life. You struggle to be someone’s something. And I made her my something.  I did.  It was not all fantastic, she was rude and immature, sure, but everyone is. And she had all those issues she never really talked about or I just never understood.  I did it anyway.  I made her my something.  And it was all fantastic.  It made me smile every day.  She made me smile every day.  And I thought of her all the time and it was good.  And it was bad.  But I didn’t dwell on it.  Nothing like I do now anyway.  Because I didn’t have to.  I could think of things and I could be free.  Things unrelated to her.  Now it’s all related to her.  I have to struggle to un-relate things to her.  Baths, wine, kisses, sex, smoke, love.  I have a terrible time with it all.  These things that once just made my life a normal life now hurt.  Hurt real bad. 

I’m tired of it and I wish I could love things like I used to understand that I should.  It’s too hard now.   It’s difficult to understand why I should love anything as much as I loved her.  Or still do.  It’s hard to compare what is and what was since all I ever felt and feel is still in me in one form or another.  I have scars don’t I?  On my elbow and knee and wrist and even on my chin I have these scars.  So why can’t a feeling leave a scar, too?  A deeper one even.  Something not as seeable.  These scars on my skin hurt once, and sometimes if you pinch them right they still do.  And an emotional scar can get pinched.  I think so.

You spend so much time thinking about her, she must still exist.  Except she might not.  You haven’t spoken to her in months, years, decades.  You may have dreamed her.  But if you did and she left a scar then you must have once believed in her and she must have believed in you.  There was something fun about that, wasn’t there.  But life isn’t fun anymore.  It’s dismal even.  Full of other people’s laughter, filtered through that ring in your ears that everyone gets when they grow up.  You grew up. That’s what you did wrong.  And you can’t fix it.  Not without help.  Not without her.  Because she’s honestly the only help you really want.  The only person you would trust to grow up with.  If you did it together it wouldn’t be so bad.  Now you have to grow up alone.  Even if you find someone to stand next to and lay next to and dance with, you are still going to grow up alone.  Cold and tired and worn out like a very old sock.  You’re life has become an old sock and the only thing to do with an old sock is throw it away. 

So have another drink.  Take another nap.  Fail a test or two.  Dribble the soccer ball around the field around and around until the grass is as beaten and dead as your concept of hope.  It won’t matter.  The grass will even grow back and the field will have forgotten you were ever there. Just do it all because you have nothing better to do and no one to tell you you shouldn’t.  Mom and dad are away, and your brothers and sister won’t answer your calls.  You’ve fallen into a trap in the mind and you’re the new bait.  But nothing’s biting.  She’s not biting.

You have to be happy that you had the chance to know her. Because she did make your life a little brighter.  For some time.  And even if the rest of your life is very long, can’t that be the best part?  Can’t that be the part that made your life worth talking about?  He died very old and alone and he didn’t write anything impressive or invent a new item, but he loved her.  And she was worth loving.  He did that right.  And we should be happy for him.  And we should try to find someone, once, who we can take in all of who they are and love them more for it.  We should try to love the way he loved.  He was important because for two months of his life he loved the right way. Completely and forever.

Dear Reader, 

This one was hard to write.  This topic, the third in my four part series on Wonder and Wander, is the most abstract and holds the least amount of grounding information.  If at any time while reading this part you feel as though you are floating or failing to grasp the subject, enjoy that feeling.

I have a laundry list of ideals, ideas, morals, values and emotions that give me a healthy amount of pride that, honestly, gets in the way of everything that I do.

Every interaction that I have ever had has been influenced by my personal beliefs.  What does this mean? It means that when I talk to someone, I listen to their ideas (I’m a good listener) and I then process them through a filter of my own personal thoughts in order to understand them.  I put this person’s ideas up against the scrutiny of what I know the world to be.

Sometimes my mind says, “Yes, we learned about that, it makes sense, this person has good points that relate to our understanding, and this is probably a smart person.”

Other times my mind sits back and exhales a long blow of cigarette smoke before whispering, “I know nothing of this, I don’t want to know anything of this, and frankly this person doesn’t know the world the way we do so they’re probably wrong.”

I do not encourage either thought process, not anymore, and I’ll tell you why.

The first one, although seeming the better option, is actually the worse of the two.  This seems like the right option because it is positive and accepting. However, it is only accepting of knowledge that I already see as true.  It’s self-validation. Meanwhile, the second option is me questioning the world. The idea that someone is probably wrong only means that I am holding the ideas and ideals presented to me under the microscope. I am questioning new information. Sure, I’m not accepting the ideas, but I am acknowledging that the person I am talking to has ideas.  In this way, these reactions are the exact same.  In both veins of processing ideas that are presented to me, I am only accepting information that fits in with the way I see the world.

When I talk to someone and listen to them, I should understand that their view on the world is not going to be the same as mine.  Maybe their view won’t even be similar to anything I have ever understood.  But that does not mean that they are wrong.  It also doesn’t mean that I am wrong.  It just means that, here’s the kicker, we are different people and we have unique ways of seeing the world.

One of the reasons that I began to write this blog was to relate some of my ideas to an audience and hopefully find people who have similar ideas.  It’s a nice way of having people feel as though they are not alone in this world. It’s a nice way to share and be shared with.  That being said, I am doing this understanding one thing:  Even though someone out there may read my ideas and reflect upon them and see them as similar to the way they understand the world, they will also interpret these ideas and make them their own.

The reason I try not to fall into the trap of minimizing my understanding of the world by comparing all of the new information I perceive against what I believe is that by doing so I am limiting my experience. That was a mouthful. All I mean is that by holding my own beliefs, I am, at least somewhat, limiting the way I will now experience the world.

Imagine I am in an argument with a loved one.  They tell me that they want to hang out with certain people because those people make them feel comfortable.  I tell my loved one that those people are not good to hang out with because they make me feel uncomfortable.  Who is right and who is wrong?  Well, both of us are equally right and equally wrong.

The same group of people that makes me uncomfortable at the same time makes my loved one feel comfortable.  We’ve established that point, but because of our own beliefs, in this case my belief that the people make me uncomfortable, we are limiting out perspectives.  Because of what I believe, I have a much harder time understanding that these people are capable of making anyone feel comfortable. I am closing a door on a bit of information and tossing away the key.

Let’s circle back to pride for a moment. There is a lot of pride in our world these days.  Proud of our honor student, proud to be a (insert sports team here) fan, proud (insert nationality here).  These are classic ways in which we limit our experience of the world. Because we fancy a certain sports team, we are blinded to the skills of nearly every other sports team.  Because we hold pride in our honor student, we ignore the idea that that kid has a lot to learn.  And pride in our nation only limits our ability to sympathize with the goals of other nations and, God forbid, the world in its entirety.

I went off on a bit of a tangent there, but it has a purpose.  Just stick with me a little bit longer.

I called this part of my series ‘Wonder Lost’ because I believe that is an admirable goal. Wonder, in this case meaning to think, ponder, explore by extending curiosity and expressing an interest in the unknown, is a terrific concept.  But when we wonder through the filter of our beliefs, and our pride and our understandings, then we cannot wonder freely.  That’s where the Lost bit comes in.

Once, a little while back, I had a deep-set fear of death.

This fear would come out at night when my mind began to process the day, week, or month that was coming to an end. I would find myself lying in bed after I turned off the lights and closed my computer just to think about everything that would happen when I died. Eventually, I began to notice my health deteriorating and I decided to take action.  I looked up the fear of death. I searched after ways to calm the mind, and to sooth the body. What I found coming up most prominently in my searches was meditation and chakras. I read all about the Earth Chakra and how it sat at the base of all the other chakras and focuses on fear.  I resolved to attempt to open and clear my Earth Chakra.

The day that I decided this, I already felt better.  I had never thought about chakras and I had scoffed at all my friends who believed in meditation more than once, but I was willing to try it because I felt as though my own belief systems did not support what I wanted to achieve. 

I discovered that with each chakra there are syllables that one should hum repeatedly and continuously in order to focus the body’s vibrations.  There are also certain foods to avoid and to eat throughout the day.  You can also prepare by grounding your focus in certain aspects of your body throughout the day. For instance, the Earth Chakra recommends that you should establish a focus on your connection with the Earth.  Every footstep you take should have weight to it, and you should understand that weight as a clear definition of your connection to the Earth.

That night, about an hour before bed I sat in the dark and the quiet and I began to hum those syllables and I tried to clear my mind.  Again I found myself bombarded by my thoughts and feelings from the previous week.  My mind swam with my concerns and the noise of my worries. But I struggled through.  Eventually, and without even realizing it had happened, my mind quieted and I gained a numbing, floating sensation throughout my body.

In that state, I found my fear of death, I wrapped it in my consciousness, and I expelled it from my mind. Simple as that.  When I awoke from this state, I felt lighter than usual, and that night, and every night since then, I have slept easy and without the fear of death.

Now, you can take my story with a grain of salt, or you can unabashedly absorb this as fact and give it a try yourself, if you haven’t already. The point I am trying to impress upon you, reader, is that I found myself exploring a concept that I had zero faith in. Raised Christian, abandoning all religion in college, and now adopting the views of Omnism, I have no learned faith in chakras and meditation.  Regardless, I allowed myself to get lost, to lose all of my preconceptions and accept something that, if I had filtered through my understanding of the world, I would have turned away as silly fiction and I would probably still be awake most nights clenching a pillow in terror.  Because I lost my prejudices, I am now a better person.  Or, at least, I am now a person who is not afraid of death. Whether that means better or worse is up for debate. I like the sleep I’m now getting.

By allowing ourselves to Wonder Lost we are permitting ourselves to be curious without holding a metaphysical map of what is true and what is untrue. I encourage you, reader, to go out into the world and be curious and look for new experiences, but do it without your filter.  I don’t mean for you to abandon all knowledge of the world that you have gained, rather be ready to absorb the beliefs that someone else holds.  Talk to people as though the ideas that they have are more than possible, but that they are true.  Believe that someone else’s beliefs have equal strength in this world as your own.  Get lost in someone else’s wonder.

As always, thanks for reading.  I hope you enjoyed Part Three of this series, and I hope to see you back for our fourth and final topic!

Also, if you want to learn more about the methods I used to explore my chakras you can follow these two links:

http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Chakras

http://www.wikihow.com/Open-Your-Spiritual-Chakras

‘Wonderlust’ is not a word.  It does not have a definition. Let’s change that.

Originally, when I started this series, I wanted to talk about the physical desire to wander in part one and the emotional or mental desire to wonder in part two as if they were two sides to the same coin. This changed when I wrote part one and realized that any sort of desire has to start in the mind and the two sides to the same coin were actually the same side to the same coin.  Our bodies cannot crave new experiences. If my body experiences something new, say hunger for instance, it relays to my brain that it wants something, anything, that it will be able to break down and turn into energy for it to continue to survive.

Our brain is the part of us that craves, and our mind is the manager of the filing cabinet that has to sort out those cravings. Let me boil this thought process down into a thought: “Mmm, hungry, body wants fuel, need something… sweet.  Chocolate. I crave chocolate. Bought chocolate. Ate chocolate. Body now has fuel”.  Chocolate wasn’t our body’s choice, and it wasn’t a physical craving.  We told ourselves that we wanted chocolate because we like chocolate.

So instead of breaking up the desire to ‘wander’ and the desire to ‘wonder’, I am letting a few themes leak through by not creating a solid line between the two main ideas. You’ll see some of those concepts from part one in this, part two, and probably even part three and four.

On we go.

When I looked up “wonder” I found several instances online, google definitions, dictionary.com, Webster’s and so on, where wonder got mixed reviews.  Sometimes the word meant a desire to learn, other times it meant astonishment and awe. I pulled all of my unmarked sources together and came up with a definition that I will use as a basis for the following topic:

Wonder-  The feeling of curiosity and awe one gains when encountering the abnormal or new.

It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.  The second part of our new word is ‘lust’. A lot of the internet decided a long time ago that this word related to sexual activity and desire for that activity.  I chose to approach this word, the second half of our new word, as an extreme craving. A craving that is strong, but not overbearing. In other words, you can overcome lust. I have confidence in you.

When you cram these two ideas together you get something along the lines of (drumroll): The extreme desire to experience the new or abnormal to gain a feeling of awe and understanding.

I like that.  I like that a lot.  I wasn’t so sure where that all was going to lead, but we ended up in a good spot. In fact, I went back and bold faced our definition of Wonderlust just now. You may have noticed that already, clever reader.

As much as I have experienced wanderlust in my life, it has always come with a partnered feeling of wonderlust.  Take for instance my trip to London last year (I told you it would come up later). I desired to experience a city across the ocean where I would be isolated from friends and family and plopped down into an environment that was not only completely strange to me, but completely new. The food, the people, streets, buildings, trains, and even the little paper “shut” signs on the cafe doors were something I had never experienced before. The wonder I felt in this environment grew and grew and nearly overwhelmed me.  In fact, it did overwhelm me at times and I had to take breaks and hide away in the safety of my rented room. I had no idea that I would be filled with such wonder.  I had no idea a person could be filled with such wonder.

When I made the decision to start planning the trip, I had a set of cravings that I figured I would be satisfying; the desire to talk to strangers, eat strange food, walk new streets, breath different air.  I had no idea that these cravings would be over-filled.  In my previous experience the need to talk to strangers would be satisfied by chatting to the girl working the register in the cafe on my way to work. Before my trip to London my cravings were small, but when I fed them this incredible amount of new and awe inspiring information, they grew fat.  I have fat cravings now.

The feeling of wonderlust grew inside me from the relative size of a teenager to a young adult in the span of nine short days. And when I returned to Alaska, all I could think was: where can I go next?

I’ve heard of this happening to people who have come back from vacations before, so I kind’ve expected it. People return home and feel that their normal lives are now mundane and boring and so they trudge through on the lookout for the next vacation.  The way I understand this is that people take breaks from not enjoying life to enjoy life. Why would anyone want to do that?  Why would someone choose to live in a city they hate with people they can’t stand just to cover the expense of a week or two a year where they can feel like they’re living their real lives? These are rhetorical questions, of course. But I appreciate your enthusiasm.

In my case, I turned the wonderlust I felt after going to Europe into my every day.  I threw out job applications to strange parts of the U.S. like they were leaflets for the grunge band opening for an even crappier band at the dive bar in that bad part of town.  I made finding new and awe inspiring people and places my life, not the break from it.

And that’s why I was willing to take the pay cut and move to California.  I had no friends or family and barely a place to stay, but I knew that it would be an adventure and I knew it would satisfy my wonderlust.  If only temporarily.

Thanks, as always, for reading.  I hope you enjoyed part two of this series. If you did, look for part three, coming soon! And if you didn’t, look for part three, coming soon.  It may change your mind!

“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.

“Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything. ”

– Ernest Hemingway

I sat alone in a bar a few nights ago and scribbled in my journal, which was a present.  Another quote comes to mind, this time misappropriated to Hemingway: Write drunk, edit sober.

I don’t feel like my semi-drunk ramblings would be worth publishing, and I wouldn’t impose them upon you, dear reader.  Not verbatim, anyway.

In the journal I wrote about worry, because all the previous week I had some pretty heavy concerns darkening the doorstep of my mind. I know we all worry.  And even though I know we all worry and I know that worrying doesn’t help anything, I still do it.  I’m flawed like that.  Everyone is. Even Hemingway swallowed a shotgun barrel.

I spent the week worrying about things that were out of my control. I’m sure you can relate to this. In my case, it just worked out that I had to take care of some errands around town, and during my two days off in the week, one of them was Sunday and everything I needed to do took place at a business that closed on Sunday.

So I had one day, Monday, to get all around town, ask several favors from bank tellers and postal workers and DMV employees all before noon.  Knowing this, on the previous Wednesday, I began to worry that I would not possibly have time to accomplish everything I needed to before noon in one day.  And I began to worry about the fact that if I didn’t finish all my tasks on this one day, I would have to wait until the entire next week for another shot. And it went on.  By Thursday I was a worried wreck and I still couldn’t do anything I felt would be productive for four more days!

On Monday morning I had three alarms set, but I was out of bed before the first went off. I jumped out of bed and rushed to the area of town I needed to start in a whole hour before I had to be there.  Enough time to get breakfast and call a friend. Then I started my race.

I made it to the bar on Monday night after succeeding in completing everything I needed to.  But I still felt the weight of days of constant worry upon my shoulders.

When I was younger, twenty or twenty-one, I had a system set up where I would reward myself for overcoming the trials of my youth.  A particularly difficult test in school would earn me a milkshake. A long, grueling study session would award me a comic book. Et cetera.  Naturally, I built a habit out of this reward system.

Out of this habit, I decided to treat myself. I had worried all week for no reason, suffered through nightmare fueled slumbers and nail-chewing afternoons only to get the same results I would have gotten if I had not thought about my errands at all until Monday morning when I needed to run them. I decided to ease my pain with beer and good food.

About mid-way through the meal I realized something. I didn’t feel rewarded.  I felt heavy from my dark thoughts, I felt weighted despite my worries being absolved. And the craft beer and local delicacies seemed bland compared to the sour pit in my stomach. My reward system had failed me. In college I learned this method is called Operant Conditioning. In my case, I reenforced a behavior with a reward. I do good thing, I get good treat.  Therefore I learn to do good thing more to get more good treat.

I had conditioned myself. But now the conditioning had worn off.  I sat there confused and worried that I didn’t know myself anymore.  I didn’t know how to make myself feel better after suffering through some trial. And if I don’t know how to make myself feel better, than how am I going to meet someone who can do that, someone I can settle down with and make a family. And if I can’t find someone to settle down with, then I’ll die alone.

The worry began to compound again.  And all of the sudden I felt more comfortable. Because worry is familiar ground for me. If I am worried, it means I have something to do, something to think about and plan ahead for. See, that’s what I realized in that bar while eating my way through three Bar-B-Q beef and pork egg rolls. Hemingway had a point about worry, you don’t fix anything by thinking about it and concerning yourself with all the terrible ‘what if’s’ that come with it.  But the fact that you’re worrying, the fact that you are thinking about your life enough to have a natural physical reaction, means you are focusing on important issues. So it turns out I hadn’t worried all week for no reason.  I’d spent a lot of time that I didn’t have to thinking about what I should do and what could go wrong, but because I had worked myself up about all that running around on Monday morning, I was ready to take on anything that day had to offer me.

Still, I recognize that it’s not healthy to stress over every bit of my life, and every time I start to worry that quote from Hemingway comes to the forefront of my mind. It helps me take a breath. Savor a moment I might miss because my mind is three or four days ahead of everything else. Sleep a little easier. Write a little clearer.

We do worry for a reason. It helps us be prepared to navigate our lives, figure out what might go wrong so we can handle it if and when it does.  But that doesn’t mean that we should lose today planning for tomorrow.  That’s what I understand Hemingway to have meant. Fix what you can when you come to it, and don’t fret over what you can’t fix or can’t fix yet.  I spent a lot of days worrying about what I would do on just one. That doesn’t even out in my book. Not at all.

Take care of yourself, reader.

Seeing that this is my first post, I will start off with a little explaining.

I went to college, as you do, and studied Creative Writing, as almost no one does these days.  After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I found the whole world open to me.  Then, after months of searching for jobs that related to that degree, I became a barista.  Twice. And not much more after that. And suddenly that open feeling felt more like a drowning feeling. I began to feel as though I were barely keeping my head above the flow of my own life.

Three years later, I now find myself tucked away in a fairly good-paying job that has nothing to do with that creative spark I felt that guided me through college.  I am finding my ability to read massive amounts of information and then apply that information to real-life situations only being used to preform mindless tasks over and over.  And over.

For a long time I saw writing as just a hobby; something I could do on the side and not care too much about.  I was wrong.  Not being a writer was killing me. Is killing me.  I still feel as though I’m struggling to stay afloat.

But I’m finally doing something about it.

And here we are, reader.  Breaking the fourth wall. Because I need to.  I need to share what I write and I need to be certain that what I write is good enough to be read. I guess that sounds like I’m using this blog as a validation tool, and maybe that is close, but I don’t think it is the whole story.

Throughout my life I’ve moved to nine different states, started a new life nine times. Granted most of those times took place in high school or before, but in the past few years it has started to even out. After college I went from New Mexico to Illinois, then to Texas, then all the way to Alaska.  If you are looking for a guide on how to move to Alaska, that will have to come later.  And it probably will at some point. Stay tuned.

Just last week I found myself moving from Alaska to California.  And for no other reason than I wanted to.  This has been my round-about way of saying that I love change.  I love to try new things and I love experiences.  I love life. Even though it’s been tough and not quite what I pictured, I always found a way to be happy with what I was doing.  I found a silver lining. Sometimes it took a little longer to do, but I always seemed to find it eventually. That’s what this blog is or will be about.

If you’re reading this after reading dozens of other blog posts that seem to have followed no general theme at all, I hope this will provide some clarity if nothing else.

Being that this is my first post I also want to explain the title of my blog.  Holding the Universe Together.  Humble, don’t you think?

I got the idea from Salinger, one of my favorite writers and a huge personal inspiration.  He wrote in one of his less-famous stories, A Girl I knew, about a girl and a boy.  When the boy saw the girl standing on the balcony, leaning on the railing, he understood that she was doing nothing at all, except holding the universe together. Sometimes life is as simple as seeing a person and understanding that everything is the way it is because that person is standing right where they are. Sometimes life doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

I have always liked the idea that life was simple, and we make it so much more complicated than it ever could have been on its own. Sometimes, I think, we need a simple idea to bring us back home again, and remind us every now and then that a girl holding onto a balcony railing might just be what it’s all about.

In my experience, a girl can be a metaphor for just about anything.  More often than not the girl is literal, especially for us romantics, but stay with me here. She’s a metaphor, too. This means that anything can provide meaning to life. If you need it or want meaning bad enough.

I’ll give an example: In Illinois I found myself in a small collection of towns known as The Quad Cities.  It consisted of Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. Like I said earlier, I found work as a barista and for four months I did little else.  It felt like a colossal waste of time, as if I had pushed pause on my life.  I was 22, just out of college, and for the first time I found myself thinking: “This is it?”

I had a small apartment to myself, a boring job, and the only people I talked to outside of work were family. At the same time, my grandmother had developed cancer. All of the sudden I found myself in prime position to spend time with my grandmother, time which now had a foreseeable limit. I had lunch with her, I brought her blankets, I made sure the television remote was accessible, and to this day the time I spent playing songs for her on my ukulele stands out as a few of the most meaningful moments of my life. And those moments took place at a time when I felt stagnant, bored and lost.  At that time, my grandmother held my universe together.

If you agree, or disagree with any of this, that’s fine.  I do hope that you enjoy what I put up on here, regardless.  These stories, fiction and non, poems, pictures and anything and everything else that helped me find the universe in one piece again. And if you have some feedback, if you like or don’t like something I talk about, let me know.  I’m sure it’d be good to hear from you.

So thank you reader, and let’s get started.