A personal blog feels anachronistic in 2020 – like some quaint past time that existed, like scrapbooking, before more rapid, visual methods of sharing and communication existed. There are many forces at work here, but I think the main reason this sentiment exists is that a good many people are telling themselves that they have too little time for reading, writing or storytelling in general. Or possibly that it just doesn’t have much value. During the past few years this logic had distorted my relationship to writing and I was having difficulty creating anything; it seemed like it would have no value to anyone else. I made the mistake of conflating the primary purpose of writing, which is to reflect, understand and express oneself with the secondary purpose of creating something that others value. This kind of writing block is indistinct from the mental block that prevents many of us from pursuing our passions: we let our values get distorted by those of others.
Each individual’s reality is constructed of the stories that we tell ourselves – about existence, about those around us, about the natural world, about what has value. The majority of my writing has always been about travel as it provides a physical and cultural landscape that offers experiences that we can contrast against the stories that we have in our minds. It can be a healing process that helps us grow as we encounter people with different values that lead lives we hadn’t imagine existed beforehand – suddenly our horizons expland. It can help us to feel freer and empowered to escape or change the dehumanizing systems that may have led us to travel in the first place. Reading and writing are mental travel – they are tools that can help us to navigate the stories that provide structure to our reality. Reading enables us to reflect and grow as we take a journey through a landscape that someone else has created. Writing requires us to reflect deeply upon our experiences in order to create a landscape that we can share with others, for their benefit and ours.
Traveling, reading and writing enrichen the strange and wondrous journey that is existence. I am going to continue writing and sharing stories about my life, beyond just travel, with reckless abandon. I am going to deliver verbose and self-important prose about myself living with intention that inevitably will be interwoven with esoteric concepts. These reports will detail my exploration of the finges of my mind as I attempt to carve out a peaceful, loving existence amidst a hostile landscape. I will attempt to give consciousness and recognition to that which lacks it; I will attempt to tell alternative stories. It is my quiet and solitary form of resistance against the story that tell us that furniture is better than a jungle, that teaches you that you can consume your way to happiness, that iceberg lettuce is delicious, that animals don’t have feelings, that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, that sitting at a desk the entire day is okay, that the finite is infinite, that you deserve this and I deserve that, that tomatoes should be white on the inside, that when the seas rise we will just move to a higher location, that feelings are meant to be silenced, that quicker is better, that we don’t have souls, that violence can beget peace, and that the future is going to be better – just wait!