The Truth Lies in Motion

“Put your head down and make your way home by doing the thing that you love more than you love yourself.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

“Put your head down and make your way home by doing the thing that you love more than you love yourself.” –Elizabeth Gilbert

Some people, when traveling, will wake up with a start in the middle of the night, disoriented, confused as to where they are and what they are doing there.

I never had that. Even while backpacking alone through India, sleeping in different places every few days, I never once woke up with the panicked thought of ‘Where am I? Who am I with? What am I doing here?’. These answers were never an issue for me. It was clear that I was in motion through a place, that this was one of the stops, and the people around me were my companions at this time.

Rather, these sudden starts of discomfort come to me only I have been in a place for a longer time, doing something ‘stable’, like working, or being in a relationship. Only then would I wake up suddenly in the darkness of night, feeling hot and suffocated, with the eeriest sensation that this place I was inhabiting was foreign. That I didn’t belong there. That the person I had been sleeping next to every night for the last few months in fact had no idea who I was. That we were individually contained entities, effectively strangers to each other. That I was an odd thing out of place and time.

In most cases, the longer I stayed in a place, the more alien I felt. The less I could make sense of my life. Like I was wearing some costume that wasn’t meant to be kept on for so long, and suddenly realizing that I was wearing somebody else’s life.

Conversely, the times I feel most authentic is when I am in a new space, with new people, and new tasks before me. Effectively, in transit. I feel so much more at ease in an unknown part of the world than I do in the town where I grew up. I can sleep anywhere and not feel out of place in the morning.

This is how I know that my home is in the travel. The times when my mind is calmest and clearest are when I am in motion, watching the landscape go by. When the world starts to roll before me, everything that was false, attached, and stagnating is shaken, torn down, and scrubbed clean, until only that which is permanent and real remains. And I take that part of me to the next place.

Movement reveals that which is true, and reminds us that underneath what seems solid and immovable is the subtlest mass of constant change. Only when you perceive the transformation that is occurring in you can you then perceive the ever-present transformation happening around you.

Originally published on livingleftunlabeled.blogspot.com, February 9, 2015