The Only Answer That Worked

Day one hundred and sixteen, Turkey. This road keeps going past the places where my old thinking used to live.

I thought in right and wrong. Trusting anything at all came hard. I adapted, I ran the patterns, because I was afraid of not belonging and because I believed love and regard were things you earn before you are allowed to be happy.

What I have put in place of that is trust in a love that doesn't do accounts — God, Allah, Jesus Christ, Krishna, whichever name gets used. I am aware of how that sounds. It sounds enormous. It is the opposite of enormous; it is what is left when a man stops trying to run the thing himself.

I have been looking for answers my whole life. This is the only one that has worked, and it works in a way I would not have predicted: the more of it I do, the stranger and better the days get.

I understand people who start families. It can give exactly the steadiness a person is built to want. It didn't hold for me.

So I go the other way home.