Yet, as I've told my California friends repeatedly, there is something about this place that remains ineffably awesome underneath it all.
Maybe it's that "spitball throwing in the back of the room" thing. Maybe it's the incredible variety of natural beauty that lurks at every turn in the road. Whatever it is, when I'm here I have a sense that everything is possible, that I can turn a new chapter in my life that is greater and more magic than anything before.
It's a feeling of buoyancy, of floating slightly higher than where gravity would place you if you were elsewhere. It's a glowing sheen over the ups and downs of everydayness as unmistakable as the orange sunset over the ocean.
Above all it's a sense that one's past doesn't matter here, that life can generate a constant blank slate everyday upon which one can write, if one has the gumption and the desire to so.
This last part is the major reason I made California a centerpiece of my wanderings this year. Perhaps it was the line from that old Billy Joel song from my youth, that I kept repeating to myself over the last year
Said he couldn't go the American way...
I kept thinking to myself, "I think I know exactly what he's talking about."
Whatever the reason, or how it came about, it has felt like a rousing success.
It is not as if I walk around feeling manic and giddy, whether navigating through the homeless on the sidewalks or hiking in the Sequoias. But certainly I've come to feel as if I can finally dump in the trash so much of the anxiety-provoking mental traps, including dysfunctional relationships and friendships, that had made feel me as if life was no longer about making personal advancements towards happiness but simply coping with the fallout of my total life choices up until then.
Yes, goodbye trash.
OK, it's partly an illusion, this feeling of newness. But so is the milieu that one experiences anywhere one goes. As far internal states of mind go, what is real, anyway, if one feels it?
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