As I was returning to Silver City to vote I passed many memory-evoking places. Places I had been with Lou. One of the spots was the Grant County airport. You can’t see it very well from the highway, but every time Lou and I passed it he would crane his neck and say something like, “I think that’s the tower. I wonder if they have (insert aeronautic jargon here).” Lou was a pilot, so he was curious about things like that.
One day, since I was driving, I turned onto the airport road. Surprised and somewhat alarmed, Lou cried, “Where are you going?!?”
“To look at the damned airport you keep wondering about.”
“Oh,” he replied, somewhat delighted but mostly ill at ease because this was a break from the expected, a variation in the routine. Lou needed to feel in control. I understood that because he had lived through some unstable years.
On the other hand, I had developed sort of a Zen approach to life. I had accepted (mostly?) that there wasn’t much I could control — or that I needed to control. Flow with the river, Grasshopper. Perhaps my rather benign life had allowed me the luxury of seeing things that way.
So Lou and I were kind of yin and yang — opposites that somehow fit well together. I miss that man.
A short video about making life choices showed up on my Instagram feed. When a decision is difficult, and you’ve weighed the usual pros and cons, perhaps there’s another question to be asked: What kind of person do I want to become?
That reminded me of my decisions that led to me living in a van. I never consciously thought about what kind of person I wanted to become, but looking back I can see how it was implied in my thought processes. I certainly didn’t want to remain the kind of person I had already become — overworked, stressed, bored, depressed, stagnating, trapped...
Perhaps if younger me had considered as part of my decisions the kind of person I wanted to be I wouldn't have gotten to that overworked, stressed, bored, depressed, stagnating, trapped place. Perhaps my life would have been fuller. But I’m happy I eventually made the change, because now I feel much more like the kind of person I want to be.