On Longing, Movement, and the Art of Living Fully
Notes from the Edge of Comfort
It starts like this—you’re a kid, right? You dream of travel, and other places. Somewhere else.
At first the names are as familiar as the back of your own hand. But then they become more bizarre and outlandish—names you can’t pronounce and they stick in your mind like the scraps of half-remembered songs. Timbuktu, Samarkand, Tuva, Marrakesh—Svalbard. You roll them over in your mouth like hard candy, tasting them.
You read Tin-Tin comics and imagine that you’re a boy detective sleuthing from port to port with your dog Snowy. You lie awake at night imagining being there—you’re a rugged silhouette cut against a foreign skyline, dust on your boots, a pack pressing into your shoulders. The case gets solved. You’re the hero.
The restlessness starts early, curling its fingers around your ribcage, making the backyard feel like a prison, the classroom like a cage. You run away as often as you can. The woods behind the house. You play with sticks you find there. They become implements of adventure. A hiking staff. A cutlas. A two handed broad sword. You’re a knight errant. You’re a freedom fighter. You’re a rogue scholar. You’re anything but your little self, stuck at home, looking out the windows to a greater world.
If you’re lucky, you go. Not far at first. A road trip with a buddy who never quite learned how to read a map. Or a Greyhound bus to the next city over, where everything smells different. You get lost in it. Not the place itself maybe. The movement, the act of going, the exhilaration of seeing how far you can stretch before you snap back.
Later, you push farther. Maybe it’s Central America, maybe it’s Argentina or Amsterdam, maybe it’s some forgotten fishing village where the only English is spoken by a one-eyed bartender who pours shots of homemade hell and tells stories that blur the line between something like truth and bullshit. And that’s the best part—knowing that life is actually stitched together from both.
You start to learn that there’s a difference between facts and truth. That truth drops you to your knees, spins your mind outside of what happened, and into what is possible and why.
You start to see your self differently. A version of you sitting at home, the one who follows the rules and nods at the right times, stands up or sits down when they’re told, raises their hand and colors inside the lines—they start to seem like a shadow of the real you, the one out there on the road, restless and feral. Alive.
You sleep in airports, learn the name of train benches; live in cheap hotels where the walls are thin and you hear your best friend making love to someone they’ll never see again. You set up your office in the backseat of a rental car that smells like gas station coffee. You meet people who remind you the world still has a wild edge—a Haitian woman with a voice like whiskey over gravel, reciting Neruda at midnight beneath a streetlamp; an old man sweeping the same corner of his ancient city since he was sixteen, who’s seen more sunrises than you’ve had breakfasts and still grins thinking about the next one.
You start to realize that freedom isn’t about escape—not exactly. It’s about diving headfirst into the life you have, participating with the world—as is. You learn that arriving means nothing until you’ve mastered presence—being fully here, in this moment, in this place.
Keep chasing there to outrun here, and you’ll only turn every there into just another here—forever restless, forever searching. Ideals are just ideas. Pretty thoughts. You want real.
It takes courage to live a life that counts.
It’ll crush you in moments and leave you out in the cold at others. Loneliness will know your name. Heartache will have your number. Decisions—gut wrenching ones—will be yours in spades. Of course there’ll be a hell of a lot of joy too. Laughter and the deep salve of friendship that alone may heal the wounded soul. Also, Love—real Love, and not just using each other to pass the time or feel better about mediocrity.
It’s all a terrifying gamble, that’s for sure. The great news is that if you don’t risk, you can’t fail. For a lot of folks that’s an offer too good to refuse. The life half lived has its appeal.
Settling takes a kind of courage too, doesn’t it? Not taking the leap requires some sort of strength. Wondering what if, while the life you want passes by, demands heroic restraint. You can take comfort in that.
Either way is hard. Risk/Don’t risk. Try/Don’t try. Life, whether lived, or counted down to the minutes, will be exactly as it is—unrelenting. Sometimes the moral high ground of holding back, the calm quietude of responsibility and keeping the peace, will warm you when the cold winds bite. One can hope.
There’s no sarcasm here. The older I get the more I realize that most people don’t actually want anything like living full hilt, up to the minute, in real time. The cost is too high.
They want something like a white picket fence and a two car garage and toys in the spare room and a job that pays for all the things that they imagine might make them happy. Looking good. Feeling like a contributing member of society. Raising children who do the same. That sounds nice to them. The other path? Hell.
It usually takes a few hits, some cracks in the ice, closed doors, foreclosed futures and lost loves, roadblock, to go a different route. You rarely choose it consciously. You sort of just find yourself there, seeing the whole thing for what it is—a tread mill, a whirl pool, the myth of Sisyphus, a lot of motion, not much movement.
“Breathing a little and calling it life,” as Mary Oliver said.
You know those dreams
you stop dreaming?
The ones that don’t blow up in a bang—
just slip out the back door
while you’re busy grieving,
the last time you dared to want
something more than what you have.
Truth is, desires don’t go loudly,
not even with a good fight—
just a deafening sigh,
a shrug of your shoulders,
a whisper that says,
maybe in another life.
One that never comes.
Instead, they dissolve
into all the little things
you know to do next—
the weight of paying rent,
scrubbing last night’s dishes,
replying to emails you don’t care about,
leaving the porch light on just in case.
Getting your kids to
school on time,
with a lunch that
has the right number
of apple slices,
mozzarella sticks,
and a note folded small
so they won’t be embarrassed.
The gravity of learning
How to survive,
the slow miscarriage of longing
Birthing something that doesn’t ache as much
until you forget it ever could.
And then you remember—
longing never dies.
It just waits,
For the right reason to wake.
And suddenly the air is clear. It’s cold. You’re on needles and pins. You’re terrified but you’re awake. Naked and alone but you can see for miles. And the colors would shock a rainbow. You throw back your head and take it in like there was nothing that had ever mattered more than this single moment. Maybe nothing has. It all boils down to this resolute and urgent now. And you’re in it.
That’s when sticking with mediocrity becomes a kind of courage. When you wake up, but choose to go back to sleep. Now-that’s bold. Viewing Reality, as it is, and then trying to unsee. Yeah-That takes moxy of the highest order.
I recognized some time ago that I didn’t have the guts to go on playing it small and holding myself back. I guess I’ll have to live with that.
And sure maybe you’re there at home—looking out the window right now. Watching people on the move. Scrolling on your phone, longing for the sunlit beaches and the salt sea air. Yeah—you’re there still. But even home is starting to feel different. Because you’re not the same. You’re awake. You can’t shake it because it lives inside you—a gnawing hunger, a whisper in the back of your mind on quiet nights. You catch yourself checking out flights to nowhere in particular. You look at the edge of a map your dead father left you, your finger tracing the route of a river you’ve never seen, the border of a country whose language you don’t speak.
The truth is—there’s no going back. You feel it in your bones, in the ache of your muscles, in the hunger gnawing at you. You’ll step forward because you must. Because the road is calling, and staying still is no longer an option. Because you’ve seen the colors that exist beyond comfort, and you know—it’s only a matter of time.
Choose to joyfully embrace this life.
What are you boldly giving your YES to?
What are you courageously leaning into?
What are you willing to lean into today?
Don’t just be against things—say YES to life.
Be about something. Make choices. Step into living.
***
This Sunday, I’m teaching a class on Creativity and the Shadows. For decades, I’ve worked with the deep Enneagram—not just as a tool for my own transformation, but as a guide for others on their journeys. The road doesn’t just lead outward; it turns inward, into the places we fear, the places we bury.
This class isn’t about escaping the shadows—it’s about using them, learning from them, making them part of the map. If you’ve ever felt the pull of something beyond the known, something just over the horizon, this is for you. Let’s go deeper. Let’s make something real.
Space is limited. Reserve your spot now for February 16 at 10am PST.
***
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