Trust your cape, the guy with the guitar sings. Life is a leap of faith.
He is a middle-aged smiling man, busking at the plaza in historic Santa Fe on a warm summer afternoon. I’m here with Jessica, a few months after her high school graduation.
Our trip to Europe will begin later in the month, and I have a lot to do: sort through everything we own, donate what we no longer need, stuff everything else into a storage unit, pack for six weeks on the road in Europe and an indefinite amount of time after that, finish three editorial projects I’m working on, write a newsletter. If I had any shred of sense left, which apparently I do not, I would be at home doing those things. Or at least making lists about them.
But I am not. My face is lifted to the sun approximately eight hundred miles away from the packing that needs to be done and there is neither a pen nor a pad of paper within reach. I am here because I’m tired of being there.
Across the way, a man says to his companion, “What is that called? When you save for retirement?”
And I laugh. I don’t know what that’s called either. If I had any shred of sense left, which apparently I do not, I would be stuffing my money in an IRA instead of spending it on plane tickets and traveling shoes. Or at least not laughing about my recklessness.
I am a Woman Without a Plan.
It wasn’t always this way. For a long time I was the most goal-oriented person you have ever met, your traditional Type A control freak, and I was good at it. I loved piling up accomplishments, even the weird ones like breaking concrete blocks with my hands, until one day I didn’t. What I have accomplished by doing, doing, doing turns out to have been a deception.
I have deceived myself.
I have deceived myself into thinking that somehow there is happiness at the end of a goal, no different from leprechauns, rainbows, and pots of gold. That success will somehow give my life meaning. That doing just one more thing will make me what I am not, that this time scratching the last item off my list will be enough.
I am restless, I am always on a journey, I am always looking for something. The goals, the accomplishments—they have all been intended to cure that, to make me into what I am not. All this time scrabbling and clawing and for what? To turn myself into someone I cannot be?
At first I am bitter and disillusioned. I had believed from the time I was very young that if only I could be a writer, I would be healed. But I’m not healed and can never be healed, and the knowing is like a wound from a brightly colored scorpion. Then I try to fix myself in another way. I meditate, I live in the present, I do yoga. It works for a little while, until I finally understand enough of what I am experiencing to realize the truth.
I am restless, I am always on a journey, I am always looking for something. And that is how I will always be.
I have spent a great deal of my life trying to unmake myself. Now, for the first time, I am embracing my restlessness. I am shedding the accretions from my life.
I am shaking out my cape.
Like the man says. Life is a leap of faith.
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Jess and I are actually back from our European travels but it takes a while for the words to catch up with us, so stay tuned because you will almost certainly want to hear about how I found myself plummeting to my death on the coast of Ireland. Right now I am currently working on a project, The Writer’s Grimoire, and if you would like to be a beta reader, drop me a line at jennifer@jenniferlawler.com. Also, don’t forget that Travels with Jessica, a recounting of our earlier adventures, is available everywhere online.