Life on the road is accelerated. Because you’re moving through everything so quickly and having so many experiences in such a short amount of time, days carry the significance of weeks, months of years.
Some people call it “road time.”
Think about every important person you’ve ever met, changes in jobs and homes and partners, and how that’s all affected you over the years, and then imagine them as a tightly-bound series of vignettes, strung together within a matter of weeks.
The road brings a highly concentrated version of life.
The motion of me, over the course of one week: I moved from coastal North Carolina, over the Mississippi River, through the rolling, nestled cove of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and shot out into the great wide open of Texas on the Fourth of July. During that time, I also had a total breakdown in my car, crying for a solid hour, feeling lost and out of sorts; a mysterious rash appeared on my back; I started a new meditation practice; stayed in a sketchy motel; tried a new plant medicine; wandered Pisgah National Forest with an old flame and sang songs and camped on top of a waterfall and watched meteorites dart across the sky; hung out with a shaman on a mountain and fell asleep beside a mesa he’d built in his living room; drank homemade moonshine in Eastern Tennessee with a girl I knew from high school who, we’d later learn, is a fourth or fifth cousin of mine (the hootch magically cured me of a UTI); spent two days digging into thick, red Arkansas mud, mining for quartz crystals.
Living on the road includes all life’s ups and downs—just more intensely, because you don’t have enough down time to process anything, because new information and experiences are coming in daily.
When you wake up in one city and go to bed in another, life begins to blur together. Something happens every day that you’ll remember forever. And you’re constantly being shown how you handle every challenging situation, of which there will be many. You’re being shown different ways of living and different ways of thinking as you meet people along the way.
It’s inevitable that these rapid changes—whether challenging or ecstatic—result in rapid growth.
It feels like a quickening, as if the experiences are pushing or pulling you through a portal into the next version of yourself, putting you where you need to be, sometimes leaving you completely stunned but somehow further along in knowing who you are.
THE PROJECT :: Two road trips across America, in 2008 and 2019, resulted in two travelogues. Neither of them felt particularly complete, so I starting sifting through the writing to extract portions and compile them into something new, a book about what living on the road does to you, with glimpses of America by car woven in.
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