Freeways, Horcruxes and Winter Break

The first blog, Our First Year Everywhere, chronicled the journey of a newlywed couple as we traversed the world as digital nomads (not yet a term at that time) for a year. There was a finite beginning and ending to the project and so, the final blog post was very important to me. I needed to be back in the states and write something that finished out the story and pulled it all together – as much as that's possible. I spent hours at my friend David Tytell's dining table working on that post and then twenty or so minutes sobbing as I wrote the last line.

Something beautiful and important had ended. Among the many things that entailed, saying goodbye to the blog itself – which had unexpectedly become a companion to the journey – was heart-wrenching. While Emily and I roamed the Earth, I (maybe we) found a home in the blog. 

I didn't know blog would be a predecessor to what has become three additional blogs – two of which are essentially one concept, just demarcated by the Divorce Line. Kinda like the 101 and 134 freeways in Los Angeles where both form the Ventura Freeway, but then there's that confusing aspect of the 101 taking a turn South to downtown and becoming the Hollywood Freeway…. why is that? What purpose does it serve? No one really knows. In any case, I didn't do the weird curve-off – just the 101-134 being the entirety of the Ventura Freeway. That's my blog.

All of this to say I don't seem to always know when a blog segment ends. I didn't think the last post would be the final one for the summer. Then when I got home and sat down to write the wrap-up post a la The Beginning  – or the last post of the first blog. Only it wasn't there. A post didn't make sense. Maybe it was being back in our Westlake home and finding ourselves back in the thick of things. Maybe there just wasn't enough to tell about the flights home. Or maybe it's finally sunk in that the end of the trip isn't the end of the story. This blog isn't a project – but a thread of our lives. 

Much like the first blog, I've come to live in this one – almost in a Harry Potter horcrux-ish sort of way. In fact, I might live in this blog more simply because I came into it with my voice. Looking back at the first several weeks of Our First Year Everywhere, I clearly had not even decided exactly what the blog would do, let alone how to write it or what my voice should be. That blog began in July 2010 and by the end of August the structure of my current approach began to take shape. October in Cannes and Istanbul began interiority and come November, Nepal had me swimming in the deep end. 

And here we are.

Over the past few years, I've thought a lot about narratives, their power, limitations and necessity. Humans quite simply can't understand everything, so we generate narratives to shore up workable realities. Certainly, there are hard objective truths. But how we frame those truths – how we relate them to our understanding of life, the choices we make, the emotional space we enter – that's the fractured, torturous part. Not only can I decide an event is tragic and part of a narrative of doom, pain, oppression or personal travail, but I can later recalibrate my narrative to account for later events and information. Hindsight can transform a crushing event into a challenging moment and likewise a seemingly benign moment into the trigger for the tragedy that followed. How many explanations are there for what brought about World War II and its myriad horrors. Scholars and survivors have struggled for eighty years to develop comprehensive narratives so we can make sense of events that may not have a singular, master narrative – only numerous lessons and innumerable tears.

In my student journalism days and short-lived newspaper reporting career, I felt like I was capturing facts and truth. That's what I was taught the news was supposed to be – unbiased, concise, informative and reasonably comprehensive. My friend, colleagues and I were charged with being guardians of fairness and tellers of truth. We were handed down a set of templates and ethics that would aid us in our duties and that if followed and honored would help us serve a higher purpose – bringing News to the people.

I now realize the News as we were taught and as the best of journalists before us had conducted it was like Democracy, the worst system except for all the others. I still believe in traditional Journalism and wish it was still the standard instead of the Infotainment that has largely replaced it. The most effective weapon Journalism's detractors have is that Journalism is incomplete – it tells one part of the story, from one narrative. What those detractors fail to point out is that truth is multi-dimensional and so far, all of our media is two-dimensional. No one is able to capture an all-encompassing narrative.

Yet the stories we believe matter – a lot. The stories we tell others. The stories we lobby to have accepted. The stories we tell ourselves. The prevailing stories – those most commonly accepted – drive and direct our worlds – interior and exterior.

So here I am – a little less than a week before departing on another trip, beginning to tell the next segment of a story. Some of it based in fact, some of it based on my interior space and a lot of it held together by the strands my brain is able to weave to make sense of the world. For years I have imagined a time when my kids are in the prime of their adulthoods, or maybe at some point when I'm no longer around – they will have these blogs – 101-134 layout and all – to help them remember or provide context as they make sense of their own narratives.

Perhaps this is how it will work.

I'm increasingly struck with the awareness that these blogs are merely an offering. They are stories I tell with narratives that make sense to me – perhaps just helping me find order in a disorderly world. They also help me process my feelings, explore perspectives, mature over time, incorporate new elements and as much as I hate to write it, prop up my fragile and broken elements to keep pain at bay and allow me to walk forward with as much dignity as any of us has.

Maybe my kids will notice how I went from freeways and horcruxes to brokenness and back in the space of a few paragraphs. Who knows what that denotes or what story any of us could take from it? For now, I'll say that's life. We're all a paragraph or less away from anything which is both beautiful and scary. And maybe some other emotions. Feel free to amend that sentence to your own taste. And now I've broken the third wall….

In any case, I leave for Patmos next Saturday. It will be my first time there in Winter – first Christmas time on a Holy Island. And the first time I'll be testing the heating functions of the air conditioners. This yer, Emily has the kids for Winter Break – which means between her "regular custody week" and the two weeks of Winter Break from school – she has them for three weeks, just as I did last year when I took them to France.

What's one to do with three weeks? When this happened two years ago, I went to Thailand, Singapore and Borneo. This time, I felt like being relatively cheap. Given I already have the house in Patmos, airfare is the big expense and that seemed about right. Will it be exciting? Is there more to learn about an island I know so well? Will it even feel like I know it to feel?

We'll find out. 

Worst case scenario – or maybe best – there will be a lot of interior posts. Let's hope for all our sakes that's not what happens.