North side of Carlisle, UK
May 17, 2019
“Made it down the coast in seventeen hours…” I hummed while plucking a bright buttercup.
The weighty pack didn’t bother me. Neither did the sunlight in my eyes, my flight out of Edinburgh tomorrow morning, nor the wallet which I’d lost yesterday. Not anything. Nothing could hurt me.
Pulling out my sign, I stuck up a thumb and sang to pass the time.
Hitchhiking was my favorite way to see the world. For months now, I’d been on the road, staying no more than a week in each city. Every day I’d met totally new people, given new first impressions, and entered someone else’s social reality.
A car pulled over. The Scotsman helped me to load my rucksack among his shovels in the trunk, and for the next three hours, I had a new best friend.
He let me off at a bus stop an hour out of Edinburgh, and I used a few pounds that a lady in the Lake District had given me for bus fare to the airport.
Freedom from identity. Freedom from community. Freedom to be myself, right?
The buttercup tumbled from my hair, wilting on the airport tile. Relationships on the road were as sweet as they were short-lived.
Some say that we can only know ourselves in relation to others, and now I think I know what they meant.
Kansas backroads
March 16 or 17, 2020
“Kansas backroads at 2 am get pretty existential,” John says from the driver’s seat. It’s my job to keep him awake on our long drive back from spring break out west. We’d dawdled in Colorado, but fears of travel restrictions and spreading the virus had us pulling 5 hour shifts to keep the car moving eastward tonight. Come to think of it, I’d met both of these guys last week through a club. It’s basically hitchhiking with school addresses and mutual friends instead of thumbs and signs. There are still flowers, and it smells of sweet sweat.
He wants to be existential? I’m not sure if this is what he had in mind, but we’re in Kansas, so I say: “You seem to have an interesting relationship with fear.”
It doesn’t take long for his reply. “I try not to let it control me. If I’m hanging from a cliff or riding on a mountain bike trail, I might be sitting next to death. But I don’t want to be afraid of death – that’s not how I want to live. Risks are part of the best life. What’s your take?”
I surprise myself. Just last year, I would have agreed wholeheartedly. “It’s my life to risk, to throw away, to enjoy as I want!” I would’ve said.
Tonight I reply, “Well, I agree, but when my life is on the line, it’s not just me. It’s the half of the violinists in the musical’s pit. It’s a chunk of scholarship money from my little town. I’m a daughter and a sister. It’s somehow more than just my life dangling on the edge of a cliff.”
I guess I’d think twice about thumbing along interstates nowadays too.
Several more hours of Kansas driving pass. We’re driving, the coronavirus is spreading, and the eastern hemisphere is deeply dusted in stars. I’m behind the wheel now while John sleeps, and George’s job is keeping me awake.
He asks, “If you could either do something great for society and be miserable, or not do anything noteworthy but live a happy life, which would you choose?”
He picks the happy life. I pick society. I have an addendum:
“But I think that we are better able to help society if we are happy, and helping society can make us happy too. So it’s all sort of the same.”
George still seems surprised at my choice.
John is not surprised; he’s asleep.
A buttercup bouquet bounces on the dashboard.
April 26, 2020
My childhood home, VA
Criss Cross applesauce on the wooden deck, pressing buttercups. We saw a few out west on spring break. The climate’s different here, so they’re just now blooming.
I’ve changed so much in the past few weeks, in the past year. The social climate is so different in each little community, growing this same person in different ways.
I close the book and press, freezing this buttercup in this time, in this space.
Community.
It is the source of freedom and security, of danger and restriction.
That couldn’t be more apparent than it is in the news or in our lives today. Today, there’s only so much flexibility we have when it comes to choosing that community. For as far as we can see, I’m home with the same four people I chose nearly two months ago.
We’ll all be somewhat different people whenever we come back – that’s what time and growth does to us. It’s making peace with this fact of life and learning what aspects of myself I want to maintain control of everything that matters to me now, even if that isn't possible. For me, I pick community, but intend to find myself within that community, wherever it may be.
~Eleanor Welch