You ask me how I can be gone so long. How I can justify my lack of connection. Doesn’t my family miss me? Don’t I want to go back?

In my head, I ask you how you can stay away from the world so long. How can you justify not seeking what’s there for us to discover? Don’t you want to go out into the libraries that are around every corner? All those people to meet. Aren’t THEY going to miss you?

But I don’t, because that’s not my place to tell you. We all get to decide these things. Your questions are just as inappropriate, but somehow more acceptable.

I watched a TED lecture today, where Alain de Botton talked about success. He said that when aiming to succeed, you have to plan on what’s going to lack, too. Because you can’t have everything. And we just choose different things.

The difference between us is not that I don’t care. Not that I don’t miss things that I love. I do miss things, and it sucks.

But you miss things too.

I miss what I do not have right now; you miss what has passed you by entirely. And I have decided that I would so much rather the former.

I miss what I have loved, to love more. What I know, to know more. What I understand, to understand more.

You miss what you have yet to love, to stay close to the love you have. What you have yet to know for what you are comfortable knowing. What you have yet to understand for what you do understand.

It’s a different kind of missing, but it doesn’t make you any more attached than I am. It might make me restless. But I am hungry to know and to understand and to love all those things that I’m missing all the more for every new discovery. For all that I seek to know, there is always something else. Something missed. I’ll never know it all, but I begin. You can never know the things you are missing.

And they’re comforting places. Like when you’re totally enclosed in a car and the world is flying around outside, and you feel like you might as well be in a submarine, deep under water in a totally foreign and dangerous world, for the way that car just holds everything you need to dart from place to place. Everything is just so safe and embraced.

I’m speaking very generally here. Of course, no two places are the same, farm or not, but there are certain familiarities. The talk of “going into town,” the smell of the well-water that comes out of the faucets, the bumpy roads…

Oh yeah, and cats. A whole lotta cats.

It was a lovely Easter.

And there is still another half a roll that I need to finish shooting (that’s what happened with spring break, too, thus the delay…)

The place becomes more and more emotionally complicated the more I’m away.

It’s not about the independence. It’s not about a bucket list. It’s not about the dare of it all. I’m not chasing entertainment. I don’t want to become a part of all these places for specific thrills.

The mental shift required to just move– that’s the thrill in itself. To completely surrender control, and trade it in for the authenticity of the unexpected. For the perfect delight of not knowing where you’re going, what you want, or what’s going to happen next.

Realizing, noticing, the world spinning around you.

Let’s just sit on the subway for hours and watch everyone come and go

Walk around the sidewalks and watch the people living

Stand on the platform and hear people speaking a different language in every direction

Stroll through the countryside and notice all the tiny universes within every living thing

I would probably bore you to death. Because it’s not consciously about making my story; it’s about immersing myself in their stories. To see all that I am, and am not. Which does turn into my story in the end. But quietly.

And if easy silence is significant, then that’s my easy silence with the universe– everything spinning and connecting into a web around me and knowing that I’m right where I’m supposed to be within that. My sort of religious experience.

It’s to gain perspective. Bigger world, smaller problems. To remember how delightfully insignificant I am. When I stay in one place, I start constructing a life around myself. I starting thinking I’m in control. I’m not in control. I don’t want to be in control. I don’t know what I’m doing, what I want, what I need. Not really.

I can’t construct my life. That’s not what I’m here for.

So, instead, I want to move. To revolve around everything else. To hide as the insignificant traveler at the train station. To trade in my illusion of control for true meandering and find myself in those unexpected, inevitable instances…

The guy who couldn’t read the schedule on the way on the Milan, and then told me all about his uncle living in the gardens in Venice as we waited on the platform.

The journalist from Rome who let my borrow her cell phone when mine’s screen died upon landing in Catania, but only after a half hour of chit chat about photojournalism and the differences between the US and Canada.

The Indian couple at the Chicago airport who didn’t think Americans expressed enough emotion, told me about their kids’ lives and their Indian festival seasons.

But those aren’t things I chased out. I didn’t construct them. I couldn’t. And I can’t explain to you how “me” I felt, talking about random things with strangers. That’s where we are supposed to be. If we’d taken a different train, been on a different platform, chosen another airport to fly out of…

And that’s phenomenal, really– in letting go, being small, and merely moving, life becomes so much more real than anything you could have thought up for yourself.