Getting back on track is hard, especially in transitory periods of our lives. Just finally getting settled in at our new apartment.

In the fall, I will be attending Western Michigan University on a Teaching Assistantship for my MFA in fiction. I’m obviously stoked — I’ve been working insanely hard on this goal over the last seven years. But my wife and I were living on the east coast, so it did involve a big move. We love to go on big trips, so we decided to go on a forty-day road trip while we had a little Funemployment between obligations. It was dope, and I wish more folks prioritized going on long trips in their lives.

Synopsis

This was a coast-to-coast journey, starting in Maine and reaching its apex in California, though it technically ended in Kalamazoo (which I promise is a real place). We wandered around California’s endless wildernesses for three weeks, camping out of the back of our Nissan Rogue named Merlin. We stood up in a gorgeous Tahoe wedding, visited all eight National Parks (that were on land), and saw a comedy show in LA. In the mountains, we went as high as 12,000 feet, and we traveled to the lowest altitude in the US, the Badwater Basin in Death Valley at about -300 feet. It was 112 degrees of joy. There was too much life to explain our journey in a short post.

The Point

I guess I just want to put my money where my mouth is and get this blog back up and running, and I needed an excuse to sell to myself. I’m in both camps on this one: I should have kept writing during the trip, and I was right to take my time and adventure. I look at some of my literary idols like Peter Matthiessen and feel inadequate in my inability to write on the road. It is certainly a practiced skill. It’s not just about the time to write, but the diligence to observe and document. Especially when you want to have a glass of wine or spark up a joint or both.

I imagine that if my career ever took me on the road and I traveled full-time, my habits would adjust to my conditions. I’m pretty good at holding myself accountable, and I’ve done a lot of work to rebuild my habits and mental processes, so I think I could handle it. But oh baby, would it be a hard start. I’m a very social person, and I make friends everywhere, so I’d have to just put on the noise-cancellers and chug away at some pages. Every time I’m at the airport bar, someone ends up buying shots.

(That person is usually me lol.)

But I don’t feel bad for taking my adventure. And I don’t think I should. Our country–and our world to some extent– has a primary focus on productivity, not wellness, expression, empathy, or discovery. As someone who studies productivity, I do believe it is a virtuous pursuit, but the line between healthy and obsessive is very thin. This is old news, but an over-obsession with productivity and results is damaging the very fabric of our human societies. People abandon every other facet of their life for success in their field, missing one of the finer points of life along the way: enjoyment.

I’ve been fortunate to live a life where I learned the lesson of balance early. I’ve sought jobs that allow me huge swaths of freedom and give me the ability to go on extended adventures. And when you do that, you change. Every single time. When you disconnect, you realize that the world is so much more local than your phone would have you believe. You realize that if you don’t answer an email for a month, the world will still be turning. You realize that there is a big, beautiful world out there, filled with people who are mostly good. Often on our trip, I was overwhelmed with how WRONG our media–on both sides of the table here–portrayed America. And taking the time to spend 10,000 miles of discovery helped me see how beautiful my country and her people can be.

Now I’m not saying there hasn’t been some garbage, because there’s been a lot of that too. But I had a friend in the Navy once tell me that it was important to focus on the positives and try our best to lead by example. We aren’t going to work out the negatives by yelling at each other, that’s for sure. And I think if more people pushed themselves out of their comfort zones and worked on self-discovery, expression, wellness, and adventure, I think we’d have a more empathetic populace. One that might be a little less jumpy at an inflammatory headline. There’s a Mark Twain quote out there somewhere about the benefits of travel being the antithesis to bigotry.

Anyways, I’m back, I’m blogging, and I’m stoked to put my money where my mouth is! Kyle, if you’re rereading this, make sure to crush those pages every day. We have entered a period of high productivity, and it’s time to make our dreams come to life.

Stay crunchy y’all!

With love,

Schaboi Kbat