It was the perfect recipe for transformation: A month-long trek around a clump of stupendous mountains. An ancient pilgrim path. A motorcycle through the jungle. A summer of scraping by with a baritone sax.
So what happens when you finally reread your journals and realize the pages are filled with mental dandruff? Quick shots of confusion, desire, doubt, anxiety, concern, what ifs, hilarity, hot temper, the list goes on. You might ask, “What was I thinking?” or, “How could I have been concerned with this crap?”
But really–does this mean you didn’t get the inner journey? Does the absence of fully-formed ah-ha’s devalue the experience?
I’d urge you to take heart. The writing doesn’t make sense because you were working overtime to make sense. What were obvious associations at the time now require lucky reverse engineering to comprehend, if they can be pieced together at all. Or maybe the snippets point elsewhere–clues are often hard to find, frustrating, and ambiguous.
You had the time and freedom to drop down the rabbit holes, far down. It’s no wonder that, in the flat light of the familiar, what you brought back seems cracked. But these aren’t the words of an incoherent stranger–they’re yours. Although the surface might look like so much debris, a veritable landslide at times, there’s no mistaking that it’s the work of seismic shifts.
To put it another way, you brought home an entire river–now comes the challenge of panning for gold.
Photo by Tapse via Flickr.
Tags: 2 Comments
I like that metaphor of bringing home the entire river. It’s so true that there are no Hollywood-style epiphanies, only a great deal of sifting and when we are done, hindsight to try and make a little more sense of what we have learned and how we have changed.
The promise of Hollywood-style epiphanies…exactly…the myth that all we have to do is buy a ticket…