Last night someone told me that they were grateful for the conversation, one of the most interesting people they’d met, but also said that at first I seemed a little crazy until after I had spoken for five or six minutes. I guess that’s just my reality, and really, I’m theme with this idea I’ve been getting a lot about not everyone understanding each other particularly individuals like me who are a little out of the mainstream. Sasquatch and the hippie chick in Vancouver were really the only ones who seemed to understand right away, and that because they too are a little different from most. But apart from those, the experience has ultimately been pretty consistent; people see what this guy said, but on the first impression people don’t know what to make of me, but once they take the time they appreciate what I have to say.
So that kind of gives me a couple more answers about where I belong. There’s really no point in continuing to try to shoehorn myself into the main portion of society where I will never really be understood her embraced. And unfortunately, that also means that it’s time to let go of the idea of electoral politics. Two reasons. First, this thing; Voters cannot be reached if it takes five minutes for them to see me as something other than weird, because voters won’t give you five minutes, they give you five seconds. And I will never become a person who is appealing to the average person within five seconds. I will never be able to say the glibly satisfying things that make a person appreciate a soundbite slogan. The other reason is what I learned about social capacity and finite energy and balance on this trip. I just don’t think that I would physically survive the campaign trail, and as such, I don’t think I should do it. I think a lot of people have said over the years that the people who were truly the best qualified to lead would never seek the job, and I guess that’s my situation. I bring the depth of understanding to everything I do that would make for a good policy maker, but we do not elect politicians based on depth of understanding, reelection based on charisma in soundbites of 10 seconds or less. And that’s just not my thing, and it never will be. I would really like to live in a world where we elected leaders based on the depth of their understanding, and in that world I would be a leader, but I just don’t see a pathway to that world as long as democracy is the fundamental concept, and I am not ready to abandon the concept of democracy since I can’t imagine a pathway from democracy to an enlightened form of leadership. So, no elected offices for me. Maybe advisory roles, maybe I find a way to sneak in to a leadership position without a campaign like Hamilton did, but I think it is time to go undeclared, and instead to declare that I will not be running for Congress ever, versus the prior position of doing it later.
The main purpose of this trip has been to figure out what is next for me. The next purpose was to figure out in greater depth the answers to some of my social dilemmas and particularly to understand the barriers keeping me from intimacy and vulnerability. I have gotten pretty good answers to all of those questions so far. Not complete solutions, but understanding that helps me choose a path forward. The details are still unclear, but this trip has been profoundly valuable in what I have learned. I have still not made my final destination of Alaska, but really, that doesn’t matter; the novel has reached the climax of this plot plot, and from here we are merely working toward the resolution of the story. we continue to the end of the journey quite likely without much further drama, and then from there we begin the revisiting portion, tying up loose ends, closing out the plot lines that have not been resolved yet. I have to go back to northern space Pizza and Donair to finish my conversation with that family of immigrants and learn about their successes and challenges, I have to go back to Sasquatch and finish our conversation and give him the answers I couldn’t give him last week, and I have to go back to Lake Stevens Washington and see what else might happen there. That is likely going to be mostly the end of this journey, where the epilogue is written, and then from there, perhaps back to West Virginia, perhaps I establish a new homebase in the west, but it is true but I am never going back to exactly the life that I had before, although one could argue that there was never any coherent pattern for me to go back to Hill. What has bound me to the northeast binds me no longer. I am the most free that I have ever been assistant I have ever been to truly knowing myself.
Today? The Klondike Highway, to the top of the world highway. Tomorrow back to the United States, then Denali and the river.