I intended to make blog posts more frequently, to chronicle
all the things I’m doing as I get ready for my upcoming road trip. But the main thing I’ve been doing these last
weeks is something that’s hard to blog about.
It’s giving myself permission to travel.
Giving up one’s job and deciding on the travel lifestyle is a
scary thing, first for all the external reasons (we’ll get to those in a
separate post). But far more frightening
and influential are the internal voices that say, “I can’t.” “I’m not the kind of person who can do this.” “Who do I think I am?”
For the past several decades I’ve worked the steady job for
the steady paycheck and was reconciled to being bored with my life. My identity was based on it. And off to the side, a second person arose:
the Ideal Me, the “me that might have been,” who started younger and did
everything right, who quit that job and followed those dreams years ago. Where would he be now? I loved to think about him, and the more I
did the more impossible it was for me to change.
Now that I’m really putting the change into motion, that
Ideal Me has been standing in the way.
The whole point of the Ideal Me is that it’s too late to do the right
thing NOW, because HIS success was based on starting early. Indeed, if I DO the right thing now, and
succeed at it, that would somehow violate his accomplishments. It would poke a hole in him. BECAUSE he succeeded, THEREFORE I can’t. I’ve done everything wrong—and that ought to
count for something.
Such is the logic of the Ideal Me.
The answer to this line of argument is—not what you’d
expect. I wouldn’t start by denying the
existence of this ideal alternate self.
I think he quite definitely does exist: he’d better, because I intend to
ask his help. No, I’d start at the other
end, and say, guess what—I haven’t done everything wrong.
I’ve done a lot of things right, and one of them was—wait
for it—WAITING until I had the proper maturity before embarking on this trip. The years which I dedicated to my career gave
me important skills, not to mention the moral foundation of having provided for
my family. Now, as I prepare to embrace
the “travel lifestyle,” I set out onto roads unknown carrying all those skills,
and that whole foundation, together with all the wild dreams that the Ideal Me
can whisper in my ear as I go.
I intend for the two of us to be good friends from here on
out.
