As I lived a life without a ‘home’ or a fixed address, I noticed a few things about many of the ‘housed’ (as opposed to ‘homeless’) people:
- Despite their accumulations and warm, ‘safe’ homes, they didn’t look happy
- Many of them went home alone
- They traded their freedom and autonomy for these ‘safe’ lives.
These people (as I observed) lived in climate-controlled boxes (their houses or apartments), drove in climate-controlled boxes (their cars) to go to work for someone else they called their ‘boss’…in another climate-controlled box (their indoor workplaces).
At the end of the day, they’d reverse the process, and drive from one box, in another box, to their ‘home’ box…where they’d likely sit staring into another ‘box’ (TV or computer). I came to think of these ostensibly fortunate people as the Box People.
The trouble was, while those boxes ‘protected’ them from the elements, they also isolated them from the natural world, from its beauty and rhythms. They isolated them from each other. When that happens, something, some shine perhaps, in the eyes dies. People get this fearful or empty look, devoid of any hope or happiness. They get the look of a drone, a slave (a self-made slave) trudging through life, going from one unwanted chore to the next, doing each grudgingly, to the minimum standard required to draw their pay and get back home to relax with a few beers and some FOX Tuesday Night (whatever the fuck that means or entails).
Sometimes, during a freezing night, I’d almost envy the Box People. But as time passed (and maybe my connection with the natural rhythms of the planet and natural wisdom inside us all increased), I began to pity them.
They work for a barely sustainable wage, sometimes working two low-paying jobs to ‘make ends meet’. They work for a boss, for a company or corporation that cares little for them or their welfare. They spend their most precious resources (time and health) doing what someone else wants, what someone else tells them to do.
These poor excuses for jobs are often low-paying (or at least below what the service is worth) and yet somehow require a background test, drug ‘screen’ (invasions of privacy supposedly protected by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution), and God knows what other hoops to jump through…all to get a job that barely provides enough to live in the box.
They enslave themselves to have new, fancy mobile boxes (financed for twenty four to eighty four months at an ungodly interest rate)…sustaining car payments, registration, insurance, and operating costs almost requires a job in itself.
They trade their precious time (who really knows how much any of us have left, no matter how young?) to rent or ‘buy’ a box in which to live. PITI (principal, interest, taxes, and some other I word) payments take up large percentages of their lives – of their time, energy, and money. Yet the space actually used in those boxes is a small percentage of the total. Even though they must also pay utilities to heat or cool the entire unused space, they typically sit in a certain chair in each room, sleep in a small portion of the bedrooms, etc. Yet they pay precious time and money to heat, cool, rent, or buy…unused space.
They pay for big boxes, but actually live in small percentages of them. They pay for shiny, fancy, fast boxes, but rarely drive them (they are too busy working, sleeping, or recovering from such drudgery).
Yep. The Box People. They began to seem more objects of pity, poor self-enslaved drudges. Their habits and lifestyles began to seem more and more greedy, wasteful, and objectionable.
I perceived these things, and somehow began to feel privileged that I was without a home or fixed address. I was free…poor, but free. Yet somehow, after a bit, I ended up in a box myself. It was nice in winter, a cozy, comfy sanctuary. It was nice…sort of.
I had (like a frog slowly boiled in water, so he doesn’t even notice the slow temperature increases and jump out) become a Box Person. Sure, I still pedaled or cycled (and thus avoided one box) and I worked, played, and volunteered outdoors (thus avoiding another box). Yet at the end of the day, I was not sleeping under the stars, enfolded by the arms of Gaia, rocked in her natural rhythms.
Oh, no. I slept in a box. And somehow my pain (physical, mental, and existential) increased in the face of this ‘luxury’. I noticed myself starting to become as disconnected as the (other) Box People.
Now, I am glad there are Box People…someone has to keep the Machine running…the machine of endless consumerism, mercantilism, and profligate waste. The Machine of Society, of an uncaring society that lets its elderly and homeless starve and go without medical attention, that allows its children to have poor, substandard educations, and to remain in ignorance.
The boxes perhaps make sense in the perspective of raising healthy, happy families, of helping children grow into the leaders and healers of the future. But for most, it is endless, unwanted drudgery, to no apparent sensible purpose. It is a life lived day to day, paycheck to paycheck. Allow me to re-phrase that; not a life lived, but a life endured.
That’s why we have rampant drug and alcohol abuse, epidemic proportions of suicide, spouse and child abuse, and various sex crimes (and other types). People are twitching under these circumstances, slowly going crazy (or apathetic). No wonder they freak out; they live in boxes, isolated from their dreams and each other.
That (in the last half of my life, with my children raised and grandchildren well on the way there) was no answer for me, no life for me.
So that’s why I am a nomad, why I plan to spend more and more time as a free-ranging, iron-riding saddle-tramp. That’s why I plan to minimize (or eventually delete) the boxes in my life, free myself of the chains we place around our own necks.
Please, God (if you are even there) don’t let me waste my life (anymore than I already have). Please don’t let me let me die (or ‘live’) in a box. Please let me die on the Road, or on a trail, exploring, being free. Please….
Oh, hold it, I forgot. God’s ‘burning bush’ days are over (if they ever existed). He (or She, or It) no longer speaks directly to us, or holds our hand as we work out our destinies. If I want to change (or have) these things in my life, I must do it myself, manifest it myself. In this, perhaps, I am the tangible Hand of God, the only way He or She can manifest in this vale of tears (and laughter).
So it’s up to me. I must be the one who will fill my tank with gas, who must twist the throttle, who must choose where to ride to, free as a bird. Only me. God won’t do it for me. There is no Deux Ex Machina coming out of the sky to save me. If I want it done, I must do it myself (and perhaps along with the help of my true friends, of my Tribe.
That’s why I am (or am becoming) a Nomad. It’s not that I am so cool or so different, or strong, or determined. It’s simple necessity. I just can’t do that to myself, the Box People thing. I respect myself and my hard-earned freedom too much for that.
Yep, I am a Nomad at heart. the time I spend in boxes is the bare minimum (and decreasing every day). Thank God, Thank my tribe. Thank YOU.
Gratitude and a tank of gas…what else does a nomad need?
Well, my clothes are again washed and my accumulation of things will soon be re-packed. Time to ride out again…this time with one tank of gas, ten dollars in my pocket, and faith in myself and the universe.
Time to ride, free and wild, under the endless sky, with the wind blowing in my hair. Free to be rained on, hailed on, snowed on. Free to make cold and solitary camps. Free. Not stuck inside a box, but actually OUT IN IT.
Yeah, let the wind blow through my hair, let it whip the songs from my lips and cast them to the breeze as I ride. Yeah, bring on that wind therapy. Let me ride, hike, climb…live.
Boxes? Hmmm, they seem to be good for putting food in, maybe even beer. Boxes? We don’t need no stinking boxes…we are nomads, free and wild and happy. We smell of campfires. Reflections of endless vistas shine in our eyes. We don’t ‘fit in’…and don’t want to, not in a Box People world.
Free…as we can be.
Nomads, all. Working out our freedom and our dreams from day to day, free of boxes, at least.
Free. I love that word.
Time to ride.
Tales of a Lone Wolf 