Exactly one year ago today, I posted as my facebook status the following quote:
"As we pass through childhood, each of us, a storehouse of alternative ways of becoming a person, imagines many different courses of action and of life he may later take. However, we cannot be everything in the world. We must choose a path, reject other paths. This rejection, indispensable to our self-development, is also a mutilation. In choosing, as we must, we cast aside many aspects of our humanity."
I can’t for the life of me remember where I read this. I believe I remember why, however. I was in the process of choosing law schools to apply to. I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to go to law school, but I had chickened out from doing a PhD program, hated my then-current job, and hadn’t made any other plans. I needed to do something, but was afraid to make a bad choice. I didn't want to get stuck.
At the present moment, I just got home from the University of Miami School of Law, where I spent 12 hours studying today. And 12 hours yesterday. And I like it.
I put up this site as a place to post travel pictures and travel stories, but I am no longer mobile. I have a place I go home to every night, and I have a place I go to classes every day. I take the same route there and back, and see the same group of people.
When I started out, I gave away almost all of my stuff. When Hunter and I broke up, I pared my belongings down even further. When I got robbed, I was divested of pretty much everything. But not long after, the trend reversed. I got new clothes, a new toothbrush. I got my bike out of storage in LA and bought a car in Portland. Now I can leave my toiletries in the bathroom, and my computer in my room. The people I’ve met in the last week will hopefully still be my friends in a month, and we will still live in the same city, all of us. It’s novel.
I made a choice, and by that choice rejected many other possibilities. By that choice, my freewheeling, responsibility-free vagabond ways are behind me, at least for now. But it doesn’t feel like a mutilation.
 |
| "You are no one. You are everyone." |
