Date: 2005-01-23
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

12:40pm1.23.05Sometime around 8am this morning, as I was lying in bed¢¦ well, actually, I was lying on the floor, in my sleeping bag. I haven¢t slept in my bed for the past week and a half, ever since, in a pique of insomnia, I unfurled my sleeping bag. Call it practice, call it acclimation, blame it on nervous anticipation. Whatever, I¢ve been sleeping more soundly, sprawled out on the floor, than on any plush mattress. And my futon certainly doesn¢t qualify as ¢plush¢. Anyway, cocooned in my sleeping bag, trying to convince myself to stop being such a lazy bum and get my butt up, it hit me. The proverbial ton of bricks, right in the solar plexus. BOOM. BAM. POW. THWACK. OOF. The absolute, mind-boggling, eye-popping, enormity of what I¢m doing. I¢m doin¢ it. I¢m going back. I¢m going back HOME. That inexorable, invisible, gravitational pull the Trail wields over me has opened the floodgates; I¢m not being drawn back. I¢m being yanked, w/ a dislocate-your-arms-from-their-sockets force. And I¢m offering no resistance. Nothing has changed; the decision was finalized weeks ago. (If I¢m going to be totally honest here, it wasn¢t really a ¢decision¢, more an acknowledgement of the inevitable.) Maybe the moon and the planets are in some astrological alignment. Maybe the burgeoning anticipation simply reached its boiling point. Whatever the reason, this morning I experienced the sensation of the floor vanishing beneath me, my body in total freefall, hurtling at an acceleration of 9.8m/s2. But, the impact my body tensed in expectation of never occurred. As suddenly as the sensation began, it ceased. I went from plunging rapidly to my imminent demise to a feeling of complete weightlessness, of total serenity, of peace. And none of that stomach-lurching-to-your-throat nausea associated w/ roller coasters and inertia. Just a snap-of-the-fingers transition. Never experienced anything remotely like it. And I was fully awake the whole time. But, as disconcerting and flummoxing as it was, it was also, quite simply, awesome. Not in the ¢That¢s, like, totally awesome, dude¢ definition. Awesome, as in awe-inspiring.4:30pmSince I recently explored (though by no means exhaustively. I merely dented the surface. Investigating the ¢why¢, the justification, the reasoning of anything is, for me, an archaeological excavation. You carefully scrape away one layer, meticulously recording everything, exposing an underlying surface. It¢s a slow process, peeling away these strata, one by one. And, if you proceed too quickly, you can punch through a layer w/o even realizing it.) the ¢why¢, or at least my ¢why¢, of walking, I want to shift to the ¢why¢ of writing. Why do I write? Well, it¢s actually a very similar process to walking, for me. At least, journal writing is. It¢s a process of discovery, a cleansing of the mind, a purging, a purification. A release. Plus, there¢s the purely visceral sense of satisfaction, flipping through the pages of this journal, and seeing thousands and thousands of hand-written words. But, when I write in this journal, I don¢t plan it out in advance. I don¢t really even think about it. I just sit down, open my journal, pick up my pen, and start writing. Sometimes it comes in fits and spurts. Sometimes it gushes, to the point where my mind is a paragraph or a page ahead of the pen. But either way, it¢s an act of exploration and discovery. An archaeological excavation of my brain. Peeling away the folds of my brain, peering into the dark recesses of my mind. Is it intimidating? Yes. Frightening? Hell yeah. You¢re striding to the edge of a precipice and looking down. And you don¢t know what you¢re gonna see. It might scare you. It might surprise you. You might not like it. It might be the answer you¢ve been seeking. But regardless, it¢ll be informative, and insightful, and educational. A journey into your intellect. An exploration of you.There¢s been a thread on trailforums the past few days, on mental stress and the Trail. Now, I don¢t want to make a generalization b/c, well I hate generalizations. B/c, well, they¢re almost always inadequate, and there are always exceptions. Maybe b/c I seem to fall into the exception more often than I do the generalization. So, I¢m gonna make just this one blanket statement (see, I told you there were always exceptions), before delving into specifics: I think that everybody carries around mental burdens, their own personal demons. (That wasn't so awful, right?) I know I do. Now, maybe some folks have the capability of wadding up all those stressors into a crumpled paper ball and, POOF, make it disappear. I know I can¢t. I¢ve definitely become more adept at managing stress as I¢ve matured and grown older. In high school, I would make myself physically ill, fussing and fretting over I don¢t even know what anymore. It may seem ridiculous to me now, but it certainly wasn¢t a joke then. I¢d give myself tension headaches, which occasionally escalated into full-blown migraines. One such headache lasted an entire month. A full month of uninterrupted pain and pressure on your head. Not enough to be incapacitating, but distracting and debilitating enough. As I said, my coping skills have vastly improved since then, to the point where now, my friends all comment -- ¢You always seem so relaxed, so stress-free.¢ Well, comrades, there¢s a word for that -- fa§ade. No, I¢ve definitely learned to manage and prioritize my worries, but my life is certainly not stress-free. Case in point -- my departure from the AT last June was prompted by mental fatigue more than anything else. How, and why, did I allow myself to reach that point, you might ask. You should. Heaven knows, I asked myself enough times. It was one of those situations where you find yourself mired in the middle, or even the end, before you¢re aware you¢ve even begun. From the advantage of time and distance, it seems blatantly obvious, but from w/in? Not so much. But, as hard and heart-wrenching as that experience was, I learned unquantifiable lessons from it. (This is a prime example of writing leading to scary and painful revelations. I never imagined I¢d be ripping off this band-aid when I began this entry.) The most important thing to remember, out there hiking, is not where you¢re headed, it¢s where you are. Live in the moment, especially on the Trail. You¢ll never be as uninhibited w/ the ¢typical¢ worries of day-to-day life, as you¢ll be on this journey. I won¢t say completely free, b/c concerns from the other world will always intrude, however slightly. At least, they do for me. And frankly, to me, it¢s not healthy to just take all your stress and shove it aside, forget about it. If I¢m stressed about something, there¢s generally a reason why. It may be a totally idiotic, inane reason, but it shouldn¢t just be ignored. If you can recognize your reasoning to be trivial, then the stress just dissolves. But this year, on the Trail, I¢m just going to savor every second, wallow in the sheer joy of being out there. And try not to get bogged down in anything else. If I feel like taking a zero day in a shelter, then I you're darn tootin' I will. And if folks think me wacky to be taking a 5-mile blue blaze to go look at some funky-shaped rock, then so be it. On a side note, b/c I¢m so fond of them, I highly recommend, to one and all, to go down to the Wasilik Poplar. I don¢t know why it popped into my head at this moment, but it¢s absolutely the most amazing tree I¢ve ever beheld. When I hiked down to it last spring, I felt like I was in some weird time-warp, alternate dimension, traveling back in time or something. And when I reached it, it was this striking, stolid monument, dominating the landscape by its sheer presence, its very existence. Anyway, go see it. It¢s right before the road to Rainbow Springs, around mile 100. And it¢s only like 34 mile off the AT. So, even for the mile-conscious among us, it¢s not that huge a detour. And every step is worth it.But, returning from that little verbal detour, I¢m not going to let myself get infected w/ the number-crunching, mileage-watching (some folks count calories, hikers count miles) virus that inflicted me last year. When I realized that I wasn¢t hiking for the sheer enjoyment of it, when I found myself walking just to reach that next point, that next town, that next destination, then I realized that was the absolute antithesis of my mentality and rationality for being there. And so I left. All I can say is, live in the moment. Experience the present. There are gonna be days where it¢s a non-stop downpour. There are gonna be days where you¢re swimming in sweat, by 8am. There are gonna be days where you can¢t move, w/o pain somewhere in your body. (Oh... wait... you better get used to that one...) But, there are also gonna be days where you see the sun crest over a ridgeline, and you realize that you are the only person who will ever be privileged to witness that sunrise, from that spot. There are gonna be days where a complete stranger offers you their lunch, for nothing in return, except maybe a tale or two about your journey. There are gonna be days where you¢re surrounded by an adopted family, a community that embraces you, w/o question. Just remember that you are never going to be so alive as you will be on the Trail. So treasure every pleasure, and treasure every pain. And don¢t worry about the next mountain, or the next state. Enjoy the one you¢re standing on. Katahdin will come. It¢s not goin¢ anywhere. But, if you spend your entire journey, focused on Katahdin, on that last mountain, that last mile, that last footstep, then you¢ll miss all the mountains before it, you¢ll miss the other 2,173 miles, the other 4,999,999 footsteps.