Day 810. It is a balmy twenty-six degrees this morning and I am up early sipping my espresso and staying warm in front of the heater. While laying in bed this morning I thought of several elaborate jokes to make today from telling tall tales to tricky bold faced lies but ultimately my jokes have a way of biting me in the ass, coming true or more often than not a mixture of both so I am rather reluctant to endeavor in any trickery because frankly my life is finally going rather smoothly and I don't want to risk mucking it up.
At some point during this journey I was joking with a friend that I wanted to make a post about how I had been faking my entire off-grid journey and how I wanted to say something along the lines that I was living in some posh cabin in a remote mountain paradise with a benevolent benefactor funding my exploits and (as I expressed to my friend at the time) I dare not make such a fraudulent post because someone would not just read it but would actually believe it and like any good rumor it would spread like wildfire in a drought.
At the time I was entertaining such a joke because things were really difficult for me and I had encountered some skepticism about the authenticity of what I was doing from a few folks that do not know me which is not all that surprising, alarming nor actually insulting because after all I am often skeptical about much of what I see especially when it comes to folks sharing their experiences online and skepticism itself (to me) is the sign of a healthy mind asking questions and perhaps even thinking for itself which to be blunt I think folks should do more damn often but that is a different subject altogether. When I began this phase of my life I was not seeking 'followers' (readers, fans or whatever term folks want to use) what I wanted to do was open a bird's eye view of my private life to the friends and family that I already had and also document my own process along the way and if other folks wanted to 'tune in' along the way that was fine and all as long as it did not affect my ability to both document and share my journey in an honest and meaningful way.
Sharing our individual private lives might sound like a simple enough task but in reality inviting folks to observe and scrutinize every nook and cranny of our lives is downright challenging and requires a good bit of fortitude (immunity) to the scrutiny that must be endured. Stupid shit will be done, failures will happen, mistakes will be made, injuries will occur, avoidable disasters will emerge and those are just as important to share as the successes, the victories and the accomplishments because learning is done more often than not by exploring the gray areas and much like life it is seldom black and white or more aptly put the obvious and the not-so-obvious.
Back to what I was getting at is that it takes an odd combination of vulnerability and 'invulnerability' to really share as much as possible and unfortunately sharing my own choice of lifestyle, thoughts, perceptions, intuitions and experiences feels much like I am not just speaking from an alien point of view but also to folks whose own points of view are extremely alien to me. Thankfully I don't suffer from the affliction of believing that others should all share my ideas nor have to conform to looking at the world through the same lens that I do because I think that is not just a narrow minded approach but also a dangerously short sighted myopic way of thinking that is all too prevalent in the 'modern' world. By and large humans have not evolved as far as they have with technology, medicine, intelligence or you name it by all thinking and believing (or disbelieving) the same things. Humanity (for good or ill) has gotten to where it is through the exploration of dissimilar ideas and unique ways of looking at both simple and complex problems and the application of practical solutions to those problems. In a world of theories everything (even the most well defined 'thing') is still theoretical and nothing is actually an absolute so go figure!
All that stuff aside I am glad that I have endeavored upon a life of questions, curiosity and exploration and have found along the way folks to share my often ponderous thoughts with along with my experiences of life itself and although I am often long winded in these posts it does not mean I am 'ranting and raving' nor pushing some wacky narrative that everyone should do as I have done because to be blunt I do not think most folks are up to the task of living this sort of lifestyle let alone living it and sharing it simultaneously. Maybe that sounds a bit arrogant but the truth is that it took me many years to develop the coping skills and skills in general to live the way I do and it still is far from 'easy' and while I may have good days and bad days I tend to look at the combination of the two because that is more what life is about than just one or the other and all kinds of wacky stuff might happen at any moment but ultimately how we respond to that wackiness (or the lack thereof) is what truly defines us.
I hope that everyone is doing well and has an excellent day/night.
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