In slightly more than four months, I'll be here.
Its still like a myth to me, a dream so bizarre, that before I even leave the country I've caught myself questioning both my sanity and my ability to actually do it a million times. All of this self-doubt and restriction, this mass of great longing and great fear, and the thousand practical reasons why this shouldn't work driven by one thing and one thing only: the urge to just go.
I can't explain it out loud, though in my inner conversations I've waxed poetical about it since I first tentatively inquired into the idea. See to me, the process of traveling is bigger than the actual destination. Arriving somewhere only means starting another journey, an exploration into the foreign and the strange and, more importantly, how you deal with it. Which is why I say "I won't feel like I'm there until I step off the plane", but what I really mean is "I think I won't feel like I'm really there until its time to leave.". Or even more impossibly, when I say "Not to long to go now." I really mean "I've already taken the first steps on my voyage, because to me, my journey starts here."
Where is here? It is not where you're going, it is where you are. Where you go is less important than the steps it takes to get you there. We learn this as babies when a stroll across the room is a mountain crossing of impossibilities - yet its not about getting to the other side of the room as much as it is learning how to walk. Yet somewhere in the process of growing up, we forget this simple notion of an all-encompassing journey, muddling it with the more mundane idea of arriving somewhere. We lose ourselves in the process of it all coming down to where we're going as compared to where we've been, a vicious comparison resulting in feeling like we never made it. Lost dreams, lost hope, lost hours, lost love... not the destination we were looking for.
The things we never lose are the steps. Every one we regretted, every one we're proud of, it all got us here. And I can only speak for myself when I say I'm stepping back into my baby shoes. I will crawl, I will fumble, stumble, trip and get back up again until I eventually find myself on the other side of the room.
Of course, this time the other side of the room is actually the other side of the planet.
A very wise man and good friend once told me in the midst of a desperate situation that I needed to look at the bigger picture. He said we can only see the very small view that's right in front of us, and sometimes that's all encompassing. But he told me we know a God with a bigger view than whats right in front of our faces, and He is eternally painting the masterpiece that makes up you and me and the whole of the human race. At the time I didn't understand this, it seemed unhelpful and unwarranted to my situation. Why would the big picture help when I am so trapped looking out at such a small view?
Though it can, and most probably will, take the rest of my life to figure out the profoundness of this advice, I feel like I am finally now beginning to understand.
In this way then, the idea of leaving everything I've ever known and loved, the places I've grown up and the two towns I've only ever lived in, almost takes on a spiritual quality. I don't mean to get all zen here, but ever since I've made the call to go, I've learned and grown in so many radical ways. Which is why, once again, I state the importance of the journey starting here.
Two journeys of a different sort began last year, both relating to the oceans I will have to cross. For a long time now, and especially after the events of last year, I've been searching for a breath of fresh air. I wrote about this four years ago here, saying "I pause when held back from nothing, I pause because I'm trapped in this motionless bay.... And all I need is a breath of fresh air to put the wind in my sails, then I'll leave this bland cove...". And last year, for all the storm of emotion that it was, I finally found this respite that breathed new life into me: I started a band called Distant Oceans and started surfing.
If addressing a non-musician or non-surfer, once again it is almost impossible to describe the incredible impact these had on me. It was a taste of freedom from the darkness of my everyday, in music and surfing I found myself. After months of silence, I began writing again, this time for a purpose, and by the end of the year had penned what I considered to be the most honest and heartfelt song I've ever wrote. From a heart filled with breaking, I sang "I hope you find everything you're looking for, I hope you find everything right here". To hear a line written by yourself and then wrung out with even more emotion by someone else is to me one of the most miraculous things in the world. The moments where the music flows as pure as this have not been frequent, but they have been equally joyous and heavenly when they come.
On a similar wavelength of feeling is the peace and exhilaration I find every time I run through salt water out into the depths with nothing but a surfboard between me and the ocean. There's a feeling of freedom out there on the sea that is so rare in modern life that I just crave it. A few weeks ago I sat down with someone who'd been doing it a lot longer than me, and when he said "Surfing's like a drug.", I couldn't agree more. I'm still pretty rubbish at it but there's something about it which just draws me in no matter how many waves I manage to catch. Jay Z might say there's no church in the wild, but he's either wrong or hasn't really experienced the ocean.
In both these things, it seems so unfair that I've finally found my place yet already I plan to leave it. Who would undertake this moment of self-sabotage? Why do I have to have found these things now? Yet as I reflect on everything, I'm not angry. All these things have converged on me now to put me in this position right now where it all spills out of my mind and onto the (web)page, and that's why I say for the third and final time that is really why the journey starts here. In the continuation of music, in starting surfing and in deciding to take a plane across the world, I am but taking another step in my journey. As JRR Tolkien writes: “It's a dangerous business... going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
All I know is these things will stay with me both here and overseas. Music and words will always be my way to express and I'll ride them, and hopefully some waves as well, just as well as I do here when I reach the other side.
