Renewing Purpose

And other mysteries

For whatever reason I get this hankering. The same internal nudge which breaks sleep before six on a Sunday. A call to arms.

In the car I opt for silence. One of the good kinds. Dark cold morning silence. Which sends me down memory lane, sleeping under the stars in Canyonlands.

That time I was stalked by a mountain lion in my sleep. Some preternatural tingling woke me sweaty and alarmed. I flicked on my headlamp and stood to pee, in the sand an arc of cat-tracks large as coffee-can-lids looped around my sleeping bag. The silence was more than I could handle and I roared in the night.

Because reality is cold hands and first light setting fire to the mountain, not the strange digital rendering of such sunrise, I try to be present and use my mind as a primitive camera, but that doesn’t work and I can’t help it. I have to capture it, otherwise did it happen?

I kid, but the awkward, disingenuous act of reaching for my phone has me wondering if I’ve gone to the dogs, become the thing I once loathed.

I don’t dwell because I haven’t the time to ruminate anymore, to brood like I use to. And that’s also a good thing. Becoming a dad made so much existential uncertainty disappear.

Doers cannot afford to be thinkers and the sporting life doesn’t support errant wanderings of the intellect. We are structured and dutiful and severe.

But then when I think of it, a lot of the noise and dread of deep thinking, of pondering, why am I here, is perpetuated by inaction, and slides toward a blackhole.

While in the throes of real action, say the mode we enter with a summit in sight, under cardiac duress on the treadmill, or suffering the banality of a cooldown— we find something like purpose without intent. (Life) free from ambiguity.

Purpose is unthinking and doubt is like a cougar hunting in the night, so we are better off on the path of action despite accompanying ignorance. The feeling that my creative bones have eroded, that I’ve become a sell-out is only partly true and the compromise is something I can live with.

Still I get the hankering, the goosebumps, the call to action, so things change, so what? Get going already.