A True Nomad

Achieving control from inside.

   It has become apparent to me that these distractions from the ability to concentrate brought about my the electronic age were in my way. They provide such ability to move fast from one mental space onto another mental space, like slipping between the cracks, a wonder to be sure, but ultimately the wrong medicine for needing to be rooted to the spot. Rooted within one, and satisfied and grateful for the very fact of existence. I am always seeking to better myself with learning, the allure of the knowledge inside of a book, inside of the wealth of information available with a few touches of my finger tips, a few clicks off a couple of links. What wonders will I find? Yet that is not the right attitude to writing, to wanting to remain, focused here upon a singular task, a singular character, a singular plot. With the quantity of information of varying quality available, one tends to diminish the need for quality within oneself. Quality within oneself requires massive investment of time, for only this mind, this one singular consciousness with all its limitations need to move beyond it, to cut at the roots of whatever is holding one back.

   I recognize a flaw in my character. Before I left the isolation of my provincial college, I had done research into the practices of Shamanism. Apart from an ongoing intellectual interest in the altered state, and the dimensions of consciousness, I had been seeking a pragmatic use of the techniques of Ecstasy to achieve a solidifying unity within the vacuum created by my inability to worship or rely upon a deity for the meaning of life, of existence. I had thought that by becoming filled with this element, as I see it now, which I felt from inside an intellectual quest, I could somehow achieving a purpose without Reason: a believe only in the journey itself, to no destination. For a while, in the rewiring of my Being, my purpose to achieve this aim I found a spirit to which I could turn, eschewing the usual drugs of drink, cigarettes, the munia of distractions to which a restless idle mind turns to escape the gnawing sense of lack, the Absurdity of a rationaless universe against my need for Reason. Now over a year in pursuit of the journey itself, I have fallen again into idle distraction. A journey without destination grows wearisome, as the sights, though of no repeat, begs of the question of the journey itself. Why not linger here or there? Why move again? For what purpose? The questions return, with a renewed sense of hopeless to ever escape the need to answer them. Wandering around, feeding wayward curiosity has left me feeling superficial. I feel further away from my aim then before. And I become more vulnerable to distraction than ever, as idleness slowly crept in.

    Only in a complete disengagement from my life did I start to retrace these steps I stumbled through, holding the Ideal (again) of the journey aloft as my only compass.

   A true nomad is not a wandering man without a home: He has settled himself as his home. The journey without and within reflect the change of the world. One does not make a home on the road, but becomes at home on the road. Thus, wherever the journey, it is as a center moving towards the periphery, not as a moving away from center towards the edges of the Mandala.

   I have been idealizing the malcontent, the shifting restlessness of youth for so long. Now I hope to make peace with this life. For I see now the reflection; why certain moments in traveling, or driving long into the a lonely night on my moped towards a distant destination feels so right—I have become one with moving, with movement. I have settled into the moment, into myself in the moment of flight. This illusive feeling of belonging to a place while in transit, has been the unity of a return into the self-flow of This (I can find no other word to express it).