I suppose I should speak to motivation.

What can make a person turn away from a well-paying job, leave an interesting city, and set off without a semblance of stability or security?  To give up what so many strive for?  Some assume I must be running from something.  That there must be a repellent of some sort, one that I am unwilling or unable to deal with, choosing escapism over confrontation.  Others view it as a kind of pursuit; either external, a search for a place or experience, or internal, a search for meaning or purpose.  And then there are those who see it as simply an extended vacation, a justification to gallivant about the globe for a bit before settling into the so-called “real world.”  In truth, the “why” of it all is something I struggle with daily.  I don’t know that I will ever have a satisfying answer to that question.  There is, I suppose, veracity in all of these interpretations.

There is a phrase that I hear, not uncommonly:

“…but life got in the way”

It’s a simple enough concept.  It’s used when musing on an unrealistic childhood goal, or a justification for why a once-passion has fallen to the wayside.  It’s an explanation that answers without actually explaining.  It’s generally spoken in a benign enough context, but it belies such sadness.  It hints at discarded dreams, at sacrificing a part of who you are for what must be.  At compromise.

“You only get one life.”

Another common phrase.  One that I don’t think I truly contemplated until I got older.  I realize how ridiculous that sounds.  A 25-year-old, still a child in most respects, claiming to have found some glimmer of understanding with “age.”  But the fact remains that life seems to have gained a measure of… finiteness in recent years.  Like I’ve been on a road that has always stretched off into the horizon, but have only recently decided to check a map to see how far it runs.  It’s not that I can suddenly see the end of the road; it still extends well beyond my vision.  But truly grasping the fact that there is an end makes it feel downright mad to waste the journey.

Written out, that seems kind of fatalistic, but I don’t mean to imply that I’m just sitting around pondering my own mortality.  Life is just so rare.  If you really step back and think about the odds of it all, the fact that we’re sitting on this tiny chunk of rock, descended from ten thousand generations, everything happening just right for us to be spit out at this exact time… it’s mind-boggling.  And it makes anything less than running full-bore towards your truest dreams seem like a misuse of that gift.

It’s never that easy, of course.  “Life gets in the way.”  Maybe I’ll look back at this post in ten years, or ten months, or tomorrow, and laugh at my naiveté. What’s more likely, that I actually have my life “figured out”, or that I just haven’t been hit with the realities of it yet?  I don’t know the answer, but I suppose questions are part of what drives me along this path.  I can’t even say with any measure of certainty what my dreams truly are at this point, but I know I won’t find or achieve them sitting behind a desk.

So, in conclusion, I have no conclusion.  I wish I could point to one thing and say “that’s it.”  It would make things a hell of a lot easier to explain.  But I think a lot of it comes down to the two quotes above.  You only get one life.  It’s a precious, rare thing that should be enjoyed and imbued with meaning.  What it should not be is something that “gets in the way.”  Your life and your dreams should be working in harmony, each propping up the other.  A complement rather than an opposition.  Too many people’s dreams are pursued in spite of their lives rather than through them.  Or, worse yet, not pursued at all.  I don’t know yet what path will bring me meaning, or happiness, or satisfaction.

I guess this is my attempt to find out.