Moving Forward
Ever been in a place where you don’t know anyone, don’t have a place to stay, don’t have any food to eat, don’t have a dollar to your name, or a means of transportation, stuck alone with nothing but your wits and a few warm clothes…?
Not many suburban US kids can relate to this kind of helplessness, and hopefully not many will have to. It’s a crushing thing, being homeless…It’s taken its toll on my psyche, and even now, almost 2 years after getting back on my feet, I can feel the chill of those cold nights huddled on a rooftop, stomach half-full of leftovers scrounged from the trash.
I was only homeless for a few months, but it lasted a lifetime. I can’t tell you how it happened, just that I kind of gave up on the world and decided to drop out of society for a while. I was tired of working 60 hours a week just to maintain an apartment and pay my debt. What’s the point of having a home if you’re only there to catch a few hours sleep between shifts?
So I moved all my stuff into storage, packed up a backpack and took off after my friends got sick of me crashing on their couches all the time. I hitchhiked across Utah and Nevada, into California, writing in my journal, eating peanut butter and granola bars, trekking across more and more treacherous terrain until I found myself stuck on the side of some remote valley in Yosemite watching a flash flood tear down the granite slope I had literally just walked across. I sat there in the rain, watching the water rip watermelon-sized rocks out of the ground, down the hill and off the ledge to splash in the surging river 70 feet below.
I realized something that day, after that near-catastrophe. I realized that life is full of peril, full of potholes and treacherous situations, and if you don’t keep moving forward, if you take too long to stop and get your bearings, you can easily be swept away by some unexpected force. You can’t take complete control of your life because there will always be something bigger and stronger than you to push you in a direction you never expected. That flash flood wasn’t some lame-ass methaphor for god, (I don’t believe in any one omnipresent, omniscient force, that’s fucking ignorant) it was simply a reminder to watch myself and my surroundings, to grow and adapt to the world around me instead of trying to drop out and do it all myself.
I spent a few more weeks out on the road, then returned to CO and got another shitty little deli job, lived out of a storage unit for a while, wrote a lot of poetry and read at a lot of open mics until I got picked up for an old bench warrant and thrown in jail for a week or so. Got out, found out I lost my job and almost took off again, but instead I wrote some more, kept looking forward…Within a week I got a call from my dad asking if I wanted to come to Hawaii and work on a ranch. The rest is history.
I know if society collapsed and order desintigrated into chaos, I’d probably be ok, I’d get by, I’d survive on the ashes and rubble of the old world and help create a new one, but until then, I’m going to live without getting caught up in some dead-end job, career or relationship that slows me down and distracts me from the path forward. In all my trials and struggles, the one thing I’ve established is that if you don’t progress, you never grow. If you don’t evolve and adapt to the constantly changing circumstances around you, you’ll get swept away by that unseen force and never find your way back.
I may have drifted away a couple times, got caught in the current and pulled downstream, but every time I’ve picked myself up and moved on. Its the reason I’m still here…
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