The Search for Insight Sinks Our Ship

I’m walking El Camino de Santiago, eyes scanning for some marvelous revelation—a book plot, an insight, a cherub that falls from the sky and hands me a blueprint. I take a breath. Listen for god. Instead, there is a goat and the crunch of my feet on gravel.

I glare at the goat, he cackles, and I pick up my pace.

Hours roll by, and I keep searching for revelations, but instead my inner dialogue quiets. The goat is just a goat. My steps are just steps. I am in rural Spain, walking, and it doesn’t need to be packaged in a profound carousel of soundbite wisdom.

A few days pass like this. It feels like bailing water from a ship filled with murky water. Bucket by bucket, step by step, the water clears. The worst part is—I didn’t realize how much water my ship was filled with until it emptied.

To paint you a picture, we would wake at dawn, roll out of a random hostile bed, and walk up to twenty miles with weighted packs. Sometimes, through a forest. Other times, through neighborhoods filled with homes that look like beautiful ruins.

Most of the time, I felt the happiest I can remember feeling.

This animal body of mine has not evolved as much as I’d like to think. Her needs are few. Nature, writing, and people I connect with. I will still be marinating on our groups conversations when I resemble a raisin.

Somewhere between mile 50 and 100, my ideas of success dissolved like dew in desert sun.

I performed at SXWS in Spring. Was I happy in that moment? I remember feeling scared. I remember feeling honored, and a deep responsibility. But I felt happiest when I laid on the floor with my friend Alli after, laughing so hard I thought I’d cough up a lung.

If happiness is simple. If all I really need is a body of water to swim in, stories, and the people I love, then why? Why keep pedaling the hamster wheel?

Outside in, I probably don’t seem different after this quest. But I find myself doing the same actions from a different place.

I feel the way my heart contracts when I abandon the moment for an idealized future. And I feel when i’m having an affair with wonder, when my heart is spilling onto the world around me because I love, I love, I love….

So the answer is simpler than I thought. As my friend Taylor would say, “This isn’t about patching up holes in your ship, but finding what creates gusts in your sails.”

Xx,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Scribe