Jedidiah Jenkins - To Shake the Sleeping Self

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action. When you are a kid, everything is new. You dont know whats under each rock, or up the creek. So, you look. You notice because you need to. The world is new. This, I believe, is why time moves so slowly as a childwhy school days creep by and summer breaks stretch on. Your brain is paying attention to every second. It must as it learns the patterns of living. Every second has value.

But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up. Especially once you find your groove in the working world. The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows whats next, it reclines and closes its eyes. Time pours through your hands like sand.

This equation has a crummy side effect: while our child brains are absorbing the ways of the worldmislabeled patterns of survival get swept in as we grow. Bad examples. Wrong thinking. Mistaken assumptions. They get caught in the flow of time through adolescence and carried into adulthood, buried beneath everything else. You watch your dad fly into a rage while driving, and your little brain logs it away. You overhear your mom talking about hell, and something rearranges in your head. A building block placed so deep and quickly covered. We show up as adults, confused by our own thinking, and with time running out.

But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake. When Im in a new place, I dont know whats next, even if Ive read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends. I cant know a smell until Ive smelled it. I cant know the feeling of a New York street until Ive walked it. I cant feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it. I cant understand the humility of walking beneath those giant buildings. I cant smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee. Not until I go and know it in its wholeness. But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back. This brain absorbs the new world with gusto. And on top of that, it observes itself. It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives. The observation is wide. Healing is mixed in.

This kind of attention is natural to a child. To an adult, it must be chosen. The trick is: knowing when we are in fact adults, and when attention is asleep.

My name is Jedidiah Jenkins. Its a singsongy name I know, Jedidiah is Hebrew and means loved by God, or friend of God. My mom was dead-set on giving me a biblical name. I mean, damn. She went straight for a wild one. I was named after Jedediah Smith, the fur trapper and explorer who discovered passages over the Rockies and died at the hands of the Comanche. As a kid I loved it and then hated it and then loved it again. It sounded like a joke, like an Amish preacher. It was my first encounter with being different. Baby boomers would say, Oh, like Jed Clampett! You must get that a lot. Id say, No, not really. People my age would say, Like a Jedi! Are you a Jedi? Does everyone call you Jedi Master? Im going to call you that. They never did. On the whole its been nice, because people tend to remember it. I have a theory about this. When you have a weird name, one thats uncommon enough to stand out but not a nightmare to pronounce, people remember you. And when they remember youespecially when youre youngit builds confidence. You feel special, worthy of being remembered. I dont know if this is true, clinically speaking. But Ive always felt comfortable in a crowd, and I think its at least in part because people remember my name. And that I am loved by God and Gods friend, I guess.

A S I GREW UP, this smiling kid with a weird name was paying attention, and making assumptions. I absorbed lessons and language and took them as truth.

If you were a suburban kid like me, you probably grew up in a school system that wants you to go to college and choose a major and go straight into a job and a marriage and a mortgage. It gives you rungs of achievement: a degree, a wife, a house, kids, golfwhateverand makes you think these things give life meaning. Collect them all and win!

But the big fancy adults preach the opposite as well. They say, fall in line and then, in the same breath, think different, take risks! We are told, follow your passion and stay hungry, at every commencement and graduation speech. This mixture of school and risk is the holy cocktail of American ideals, and for those rare beacons of exceptional success, it turns their life stories into fables. But for ordinary folks, it is a difficult road to walk. Be sensible, but be wild. Be ordered, but be free. Be responsible, but take risks.

I took this double-speak to heart like any good kid born in the eighties. Do what you love and follow your passion became foundational virtues. But its all so slippery. Do what you love, but stay on the assembly line. Theres no time to find what you love, you should be building your credit score. Take risks, but dont be foolish. Believe in yourself, but only if youve proven you should. Havent you seen those idiots auditioning on American Idol, thinking they can sing? Dont be one of them. Dont embarrass yourself. Dont waste time at a job you hate, but magically manifest money to leave that job and chase a dream. Got it? Perfect