Many years ago, I was on an ill-prepared hike along the Appalachian Trail. It had been a spontaneous trip, taken during Spring Break from Kalamazoo Valley Community College where I was a student. The month was late March, or perhaps Early April. It was cold.
I drove nonstop down to Tennessee and began hiking. On the second night, I woke up shivering in a shelter at two in the morning. My thin, LL Bean sleeping bag was no match for the near-freezing temperature of the cold Spring in the Smokey Mountains. Thru hikers, men who had been hiking for months on their way from Georgia to Maine, snored on either side of me with a deep, thunderous rumble. I shivered and shook like a sapling in a hurricane. After a few hours, I could tell that I was in actual trouble. I was so cold.
I got up and began hiking by moonlight, retracing the steps of the day before. My flashlight provided a tiny ring of light, beyond which weird nature noises sounded in the dark. Growls, barks, rustling branches, hoots, chirps—the symphony of the many species that were at home in this world filled my ears, reminding me that I was an intruder, stumbling to keep warm, lurching for safety.
Eventually, I came to the shelter I’d stayed in the night before. The sun was coming up. A woman was there, making herself breakfast. She was surprised to see me and made me a cup of warm tea. I sat and drank it until my shivering finally stopped. We talked. And talked. And talked. We had some things in common, and I attached meaning to each of them like a boy hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree until a glittering, shiny thing emerged that I mistook for love.
“It’s God’s will,” I told my mother just a few weeks later when I decided to leave my entire life behind and move to California to live with the woman who gave me tea in that shelter in Tennessee. My mom looked at me with an expression of weary fear. She thought she’d seen me through the crazy years of my adolescence. I had been doing better after years of impulsivity, recklessness, and risk-taking, but now, it seemed, I was as crazy as ever.
That move changed my life. The relationship didn’t last, but the life I created, or the life that created me, endures. I’ll never forget the feeling I had of completely abandoning reason and following my urges. I mistook a flying leap for surrender to the divine. I turned an infatuation into a pilgrimage. In some ways, I suppose, I’m still on that hike. But in many ways, I am not. I sometimes stifle whimsy, drowning my squirming ideas and urges like a litter of kittens, stuffed into a sack and tossed in a river.
But sometimes I follow my impulses for adventure. I moved to Japan when I was 39. I spent nearly all my savings to make a short film once. I write and I write and I write, answering a call, though I don’t always know who or what is calling. And that’s the question, the one that began this story: What is the call and when do I answer it?
Because I do believe in a purpose, a higher nature, the will of God, Buddha nature, our better self — whatever you wish to name it. I believe we are not directed solely by reason for the accumulation of money, property, or prestige. I know in my heart that poetry, love, truth, and beauty are the beacons I must follow, but that I live in a world that punishes more often than it rewards.
And I know that my own wishful thinking, delusion, and madness can masquerade as a calling, urging me off a cliff instead of up a mountain. How do I discern divine desire from delusion when neither are born of logic?
The answer I’ve come up with so far is trust. I must trust that when I follow what I think is my calling, even when I’m wrong, I will learn what I had to learn. I no longer believe it was God calling me to California when I was 20. A year of chaos followed, and some heart-rending pain. But that hike led me to a life I believe is closer to my calling, not governed by vices masquerading as virtues, but filled with genuine love and affection.
There is another delusion that rules me now. The fear of risk. Spurning some desires in the service of an imagined duty can be another form of delusion. How to parse it? This thought weighs on me because I’ve taken a step back from my career to pursue more creative work. It feels like another leap into the unknown. I have decided that my affliction to create is a calling instead. It is something to answer rather than smother. Am I following another delusion down a garden path? Maybe! But I turn 55 in a few months, there are fewer and fewer cliffs to jump off or mountains to climb, and so I take the leap and feel the fear. If you have a similar inclination, I hope you take the leap too.
My only prescription is this: nurture your intuition. Learn to discern it from fear. Follow the former, and shun the latter. Take the leap when you can. It gets scarier and scarier. That’s OK. We can do scary.
Thru-hiking beside you on the long trail,
I am,
Your Free Life Coach,
Sean Sakamoto
Love it, and I'm 55 as well--double nickels as my brother said. I'm trying to be less surprised that some things never get any easier in life, and certainly some things become more difficult. Thanks for the inspiration.
Thanks for this post. It still rings true at my age of 75, though it seems impossible I'm that age.