Epiphanies and motorbikes.

This post was originally published on 14 Jan, 2023, and moved here to my new blog.

We think we can know ourselves, and predict our realizations and epiphanies based on the stories we create and tell ourselves.

We can not. 

We come to realization on realization’s time, and no sooner. We can’t predict the when or where, though we try, but these things come to us when they are ready, and they fill our darkest corners with light to chase away the fears and doubts lurking there.

We have uprooted our entire existence. We sold everything and left our home, our place of history and identity. We tell ourselves lies, that we can handle it, that everything is going to work out fine, simply that we can thrive, as individuals and as partners, in this new venture. They remain lies until the realization comes, and the doubts and fears are chased out. 

I have, for most of my adult life, had a deep appreciation for the time machine of sense memory, for the way that a sight, a sound, or smell can transport you through time and space in an instant. This is what I have craved over the last years: These novel inputs of sense memory to load in the time machine so that when life demands the time has come to fire it up, I can turn the dials and transport myself. To have a catalog of new places and times to relive as desired. Right now, I spend a lot less time revisiting these sense memories than I do creating them. They wait for me there, for a time in my life when I can’t be creating, but require the reassurance of the existence of them.

Love is not in doubt. We have been tested in love, compassion, forgiveness and understanding many times, and have emerged having grown. We may not be the same idealistic young lovers we were. We are now tested and forged by life’s difficulties, hardened, with eyes fully open and able to see and understand our love, and the place we take in each other’s consciousness.

We now have love that is because we are.

Tam is the one person I could do this with, uprooting our lives like we are. She is the most person I know: compassionate, understanding, forgiving, smart, sexy, and adventurous. The pleasure I take from having had the pleasure of traveling, even just existing, with her, is an immeasurable source of gratitude to me. I have learned so much of life and existence from her. And I have learned about myself from her, because we can only see ourselves in the reflections sent back from the people we surround ourselves with. If I can be with her, then I can’t be too terrible a human being. 

She deserves a medal for putting up with me over the last decade. My mistakes, my personal epiphanies, and my neuroses, while driving my own personal evolution to a better man, have challenged her to her very ness. If I only take into account all my Roy Kent-like grumping about and temper tantrums while working on houses, I realize how hard I have been to be around, not to mention all my other terrible habits and my own ness. It just makes it more clear to me what a great person I have lucked into spending my time with.

I am forever grateful to her for her.

This rambling has a point:

Tam and I rented a scooter and took a beautiful ride North, along this rugged, remote coastline of Vietnam where we are staying. I rode this funny little scooter, sputtering and smoking, with terrible brakes, up and down steep winding roads, my nose, eyes, ears, and skin overloaded with new senses becoming new memories. I could feel the shared-consciousness closeness of having Tam on the back of the scooter as we commented on the goats and cows and chickens in the road. We teased each other with comments of the world around us, and selfishly absorbed every particle of it all. As we topped a hill, overlooking this coastline of a place we have never been, overflowing with the simple joy of adventuring  together, it came to me:

 This is our life now.

This is our existence now.

I told her this, and when I did, all the realization arrived behind the void of the words, to fill all my dark places and quiet corners. I was breathing into the places in myself that I had forgotten about for so long. I was expanding, filling up with the realization of love and existence. I felt gratitude to her, and crucially, to myself. I knew that we would be okay.

This is our life now.