.:everything i know about life, i learned from ‘fight club’:.
when we moved to austin, we had to do it in a not-so-optimal way. the main problem was the fact that our apartment was not going to be ready by the time i had to start work. as a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be ready until my first day of work on the nose. this wouldn’t have been a big deal if:
A) we didn’t have two rather large dogs (boxers)
B) the majority of hotels would let you bring your animals with you without
C) charging you the amount of a small home loan to do so
so we decided that we would drive down separately. i would leave cincinnati on friday and get there saturday evening, and christy would leave sunday and get there monday…the day that our apartment would be ready for us to move into.
we have two cars…a small two-door honda civic and a bigger CR-V to haul the dogs and my music gear around in. we decided that it would be best for christy to take the CR-V and i would take the civic. this worked out well because we had movers come a couple of weeks earlier and pick all of our stuff up to transport here, so we were down to our ‘basics’. i was actually able to pack all of my stuff up into that little two door car…
…and i couldn’t understand why i felt so…good. sure, i was moving to a new city, and that’s pretty exciting. but i was leaving 19 years of friends and comfort and family in the dust like i might leave a dirty dish in the sink. how could that possibly feel good…?
and so i started to drive, thinking that i was probably just in shock, and that it was probably going to hit me in a couple of hours that i was really leaving…that i was really taking a huge step in my life. but that never came; that ‘good’ feeling just kept on getting stronger and stronger the further i distanced myself from the city.
after my ten or so hours on te road, it suddenly hit me what it was. it was the fact that it was the first time that i had been truly free since i moved out of my parents house when i was 19. i say that because when you live with your parents, you don’t really have a lot of responsibilities. everything is basically provided to you, and you are afforded the luxury of being able to concentrate on the bright center of the universe that is ‘you’ without any of those fun little ‘life distractions’. when i say ‘life distractions’, i mean things like having to pay an electric bill. or having to pay the mortgage. or having to get up and go to an 8:00 meeting so you can make money to do joyous things like pay the electric bill and mortgage.
it felt really amazing to not feel (even temporarily) obligated to anybody but myself. of course, i started conjuring up all of these visions in my head…visions of a lone cowboy out on a desert plain, just him and his horse…of the old man who takes his last remaining cash and buys a giant boat and sails out to sea into the sunset never to be seen again. i didn’t have a bunch of bills to pay (just a car payment), i didn’t have a house anymore, i didn’t technically have a job just yet (yeah, i’d start that monday, but work with me here…) and i didn’t have any particular plans other than to just drive until i didn’t feel like driving anymore.
so i had this amazingly liberating feeling of freedom coming over me…and we’re not just talking freedom in the sense of being liberated from life’s little minutiae, but being liberated from my/our ’stuff’ in general too. remember…the movers had come two weeks earlier to grab our large earthly belongings, so it truly felt like we were starting with absolutely nothing. we had time to separate ourselves from those things. in that separation, i came to realize that, minus my two dogs and christy, everything that i truly valued, everything that i really ‘needed’ (and i use the word ‘need’ in a very loose way) was in this tiny two door civic. i had:
- some clothes, all stuffed into one mid-sized suitcase
- shoes
- my medication
- my guitars and my amp
- my laptop
- my iPod
- my cell phone
- some beef jerky
- water
- CDs
i started to really think about the movie/book ‘fight club’ and how much we let our stuff tie us to where we are. we use our stuff as an excuse to avoid action and change, and that is truly sad. i think the only path to evolution is moving out of your comfort zone, moving out of your stale dead space. when we don’t move, when our brains are stagnant and weighted down, we do not change and the rest of the world just passes us by…hence i think one of the reasons why we spend so much time going, ‘gee, it’s 2007…where the hell did the last year go?’
there is so much more to living than just acquiring a bunch of junk that you don’t really need, that will be irrelevant when it’s all said and done. it seems like such a no-brainer, but when you sit and think about it, we’re conditioned to think that stuff actually means something from the very minute we become cognizant of our surroundings.
we are very much conditioned by the media, by advertising and marketing (yes, i am part of that machine) to be made to think that ‘things’ equate ’success’, that the things we have and hold somehow make us more than what we really are. i guess that’s part of the marketing game…to create an image around something that ultimately changes or enhances your own image in some imagined way. take all of that stuff away, strip the image off, take all of your responsibility away, and all you’re left with is you, your brains and the instinct to survive…and life all of a sudden takes a whole new meaning. no, i’m not implying at all that i was mr. rugged or anything…i was still driving a car and i still had a bunch of extraneous stuff that i didn’t ‘need’ (i.e. laptop, iPod, etc.)…but it’s the idea, the principle of the matter, the realization of possibilities…an awakening?…that made it feel so good to just…be…alive.
i know that none of this is genius-speak, none of it really anything that hasn’t been realized before. but there’s a huge difference between theory and experience, the essence of an idea and the actual idea in motion. it’s like a really huge moment of, ‘ohhhhhhh…i get it now!’, and those moments should be very much savored.
i will remember those couple of days for the rest of my life as vividly as if they happened just yesterday…
yep.