Life, Liberty and the pursuit of

Funny how life has a way of getting ahead of me, I feel like it was only days or weeks ago that I began life as a graduate student and now I sit here almost a month into my second semester of studies. As I had hoped for at the beginning of this chapter it has been a most illuminating experience. It has also forced me to settle down more than I had in the last four years.

This is a startling revelation for me, to wake up and realize how many things I now have keeping me rooted in my current location. I don’t know if everyone properly understand my wanderlust. How much I yearn for the open road, for new experiences and people, for unfamiliar setting and places. To be honest it wasn’t until I began to acquire so many things (car, apartment, etc) that I properly understood the weighty effect they would have on not just my physical body but also my soul. There are times I long to break free and just set off for a new location with nothing more than a vague plan.

Yet there is something very nice about stability, about knowing with more certainty what tomorrow will bring. It’s nice to have a stable group of friends around me, to have a community where I’m not some transient wanderer but an integral part of the rhythms and cycles of life. Where I’m expected to be week in a week out, I do enjoy the feeling of acceptance and (albeit perceived) permanence of my current life.

I learned a long time ago that a man’s life is one of duality, it ebbs and flows with pulls and pushes of forces far greater than its individual parts. Philosophers call these forces those of light and dark, Jewish mystics call them the yetzer hara and yetzer tov, and Hunter S. Thompson called it a relentless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other. I have tried as I’ve grown older to reconcile these competing interests and I know that I will always have to be examining and reexamining myself to see where I stand. My desire to roam and be free is offset by my desire for stability; my desire for chaos is offset by my desire for order. All any of us can hope to do is understand our impulses to become intimately attuned to them and make sense of them as much as making sense of anything is possible. May we all merit the strength to do just that.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Shalom Aleichem.