Hans Thoma: The Wanderer [Der Wanderer] (1903)

"I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it."

I had become too focused, too purposeful, and so had The Muse, whose role as Port Commissioner often seemed all-consuming. We'd start our days by syncing schedules and end them with a late supper. I would rise ever earlier, and she'd come to bed seemingly ever-later, sometimes not quite asleep yet when my alarm was going off. Life can become all-consuming, more obligatory and predatory than freeing and renewing; hamster wheels with vaunted purposes; debts incurred solely to achieve leverage.

We went around and around to reach an agreement on the terms of our disengagement, for engagement had become addictive, enlarging responsibilities into imperatives. Achieving indespensibility brings great danger only ever stemmed by deliberate disengagement or unwanted displacement. There are no indispensable actors, ever, especially when you sense yourself becoming one of them. This world has survived the loss of infinitely inummerable indespensibles. That might be the sole purpose of this Earth, this universe. Loss might be the only actual imperative, and recovery the only actual purpose. Everything else can and seemingly must be reversed, and seems born reversible.

I must enter the unknowable occasionally in order that I might retain a tiny sliver of understanding. This world—this nation at present—proves far too insane for anyone to maintain continuous engagement. I must, it seems, disengage in order to remain present, one of the more powerful paradoxes presented to each. How I disengage might not matter nearly as much as that I sometimes do, and frequently enough that I can recognize my own vacuity, my '-linities.' Masculinity for me. Another for others. I rediscover myself in unfamiliar places. I seem to lose some essence when too purposefully engaged. Too much mindfulness leaves a hollowness that only purposelessness can refill.

I'm not so much packing as abandoning. I will leave ninety-nine and ninety-nine-one-hundredths percent of my stuff behind, retaining only some spare essence. I learned how to leave much of my stuff behind by taking far more than I could ever live with when I left. I used to reserve one suitcase for a subset of my library, lest I be left without adequate reference material as I traveled. I'd take three or four forms of luggage, so much that I couldn't lug it around. I was forever paying for luggage carts. I once even bought a collapsible hand truck, which I would dutifully add to my luggage pile to facilitate relocating it. Now, I'm more apt to deliberately leave something important behind to see how I might live without it. Age and experience have rendered me more of a minimalist when it comes to disappearing.

Of course, we have a destination in mind, but we promise ourselves not to lose our minds when we find that destination changing, as it most certainly might. We practice holding purpose as lightly as possible so that alternatives might come into focus before we pass. We swear we will not become slaves to any schedule as we travel. Our purpose will never degrade into making time, for we toodle to insult time, to render it just as irrelevant as possible for a time. I will find my father's ghost insisting that we head out before dawn because that's what he taught me that travelers do. I will clash with The Muse's sense that she should be sleeping in if she's off on a toodle. I will rise at my usual time and try to find internet access, along with my usual mug of decaf. I will not have heard the news because I wouldn't have been listening for it.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz