If you know me, you probably know that I’m a romantic. I prefer to believe that I’m a romanticist, so if you took “romantic” to mean someone who’s interested in romance novels or something of that nature, I’d sternly reply that I, in fact, hate romance novels. I also dislike most romance movies, as it were.
But I’m a romantic through and through. Excessively sentimental and prone to bouts of imaginative wandering through the labyrinths of my mind. I don’t know if it’s my particular blend of Myers-Briggs components, but I am who I am.
I’ve been in Hokkaido for a full week now, with four days left to go. As with much of my life recently, I feel as though with each blink, another day has flown past. So dramatic, right? But I feel this way. My brain knows that that’s an absurd idea and if that were really true, it would turn into 2018 after something like five minutes. But I feel this way.
The way I feel means a great deal to me. I take my feelings pretty seriously, too seriously at times. According to who you ask, men both are and aren’t supposed to be in touch with their feelings. I think I am though, because I process internally. I’m self-aware, uncomfortably so. I notice things about myself and my mind and heart are in this constant battle to not say stupid things. I think about things without thinking about thinking about those things until suddenly, things finally piece together, because of my thinking. At first, I didn’t think it was healthy because I thought I had to be speak up in my group at retreats while someone plays acoustic guitar on stage or be super vulnerable in my small group and elicit soft murmurs of agreement and empathy from my peers in order to experience genuine epiphanies. But if there’s anything I’ve taken to heart during this past year, it's that I’m genuinely okay with who I am. I’m introverted and I like to ponder things inside my head. Accepting myself has been incredibly freeing. There are times when I have these almost out-of-body experiences where I’m taking a mental step back and looking at myself the way a parent would look at their child. I’m not crazy, I promise. I’m just finally learning to seek the diamonds in my own rough instead of focusing on the amount of rough.
Writing also means a great deal to me because it is the only way I know how to be “artistic.” If my life depended on my ability to draw, I think I would die. But over the years, my fingers have learned to translate the pictures floating around my mind into phrases, and put words to the feelings bubbling in my heart. I don’t think I’d be able to draw and paint a forest very well, but give me some time and a few pages and I’ll teleport you there myself. I credit my parents with nurturing this creative outlet early on in my life. I can’t recall particularly enjoying the instrument lessons and sports classes I had to take as a child, but attending those youth writing courses at CSULB a few summers in my elementary years were, without a doubt, life-changing. Those are heavy words, but the truth is the truth.
So because I’m a romantic and I like to write (I don’t believe I’m a “writer” just yet), I booked this week-and-a-half-long trip to Hokkaido to step in the likeness of those greats, writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Twain. I have this secret desire to live a life like Chris McCandless, but to be successful in the endeavor. I want to be like Sam Gribley, stealing hawk eggs and carving out living spaces in the trunks of trees, making clothes from deerskin and trapping rabbits in clever homemade wooden traps. But my daily reality is very unlike Sam’s existence in the Catskill Mountains. Out here, I am sleeping in nice heated rooms every night, so heated that I don’t need to wear pants to sleep if I don’t want to. I like to tell myself I could still survive in the style of the frontierspeople of old, that I’d be fine if only I had a companion like Frightful.
I’ve been reading Blue Like Jazz again. Voraciously. I don’t remember the last time I got through a book this quickly. I think Donald Miller and I share the same soul. Like we’re actually the same person. But then I remember he’s a genius and so we are actually different people. It’s amazing how much I can relate to him and his experiences. It’s unbelievable that I only own Blue Like Jazz…sorry, Donald. This is my best attempt to describe why I needed to leave where I was, why I went to Alabama and Texas in the summer of 2015, and why I felt like I needed to come out here to Japan. And it’s not even in my own words, because for a long time (and possibly still), I couldn’t put it into my own words. I hope I’m not breaking any laws by copying such a lengthy passage, but then again, I don’t think Don is the type of guy who’d mind anyway. Here goes:
“I led the college group for a couple of years and enjoyed it at first, but it wasn’t long before I felt like a phony. I got tired of myself. I didn’t like to hear my own voice because I sounded like a talk-show host.
One afternoon, I made an appointment with my pastor and told him I was leaving, that I was going into the world to get my thinking straight.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so. Maybe,” I told him.
“Can you talk about it?” He looked concerned.
“No, not really.”
“I understand you need a break. Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off.”
“I was thinking longer,” I told him.
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Can you put a time limit on these things?”
“What things, Don?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, sort of staring out the window.
“Can you tell me how you feel?”
“No. I’ve tried to put words to it, you know, but I can’t. I’m just really tired. Mentally drained. I feel like I am jumping through hoops or something. I don’t feel like God is teaching through me. I feel like I am a fake person, you know. I say what I need to say, do what I need to do, but I don’t really mean it.”
“What does the real you want to say and do?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. That is what the trip is about.”
“Are you having a crisis of faith?” He looked concerned again.
“Maybe. What is a crisis of faith?” I asked him.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Yes, I want to go on a trip with Him.”
“You aren’t having any doubts at all?” he asked.
“No, I don’t have any doubts about God or anything; it’s just me. I feel like I am constantly saying things I don’t mean. I tell people they should share their faith, but I don’t feel like sharing my faith. I tell people they should be in the Word, but I am only in the Word because I have to teach the Word. I said to a guy the other day, ‘God bless you.’ What does that mean? I have been saying that stuff all my life, but what does that mean? Then I started thinking about all the crap I say. All the clichés, all the parroted slogans. I have become an infomercial for God, and I don’t even use the product. I don’t want to be who I am anymore.”
“So you think you should go away,” he clarified.
“Yes.”
“Where will you go?”
“America.”
“America?” He looked confused.
“America.”
“We are in America right now, Don.”
“Yeah, I know. But there are other parts to America. I’d like to see the other parts. I was looking at a map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were more green with big lumpy mountains. I’d like to go to those places.”
“Do you think God is out there somewhere? Out there in the lumpy places?”
“I think God is everywhere.”
“Then why do you have to leave?”
“Because I can’t be here anymore. I don’t feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete. Tired. It has nothing to do with this church; it’s all me. Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am. It feels like I should go back and get the person I am and bring him here to the person I should be. Are you following me at all? Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?”
The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away.
Yeah, I know my citation isn’t correct. But I hope you enjoyed that, whether you understood it or not. As I said, Miller is a genius. If you don’t understand him though, I don’t doubt it’d be difficult to understand me as well. I don’t mean to sound condescending, like I’m far beyond your mental capacity or something. It has nothing to do with that. I have friends I can’t understand well, though I love them. We just have our wiring connected differently. I don’t think I had it in me to try to explain this to everyone before leaving. I didn’t have it in me physically or mentally. Forgive me, but I am who I am. Obviously, there is much more after this that Miller goes on to say, but that is his story. There is more that followed in my story as well, but I’m ruminating for now. Maybe you can ask me about it if we meet up.
I’m also well aware of that article from TGC or DG or wherever with the title “Does Authenticity Trump Holiness?” or whatever it is. I read through it a couple of times, and I guess it’s written as balanced as it could be, considering the author’s answer seems to be “No.” While I do ultimately agree with him, he seemed to write off authors and creatives like Miller too easily. Blue Like Jazz was written in 2003, long before this own crisis of mine. This (seeming) clash of authenticity and holiness is not new. If you’re not going through or have never gone through this kind of crisis or aren’t cut from remotely the same cloth as people like Miller or me, of course this all seems slightly ridiculous, perhaps overly dramatic and unnecessarily sentimental. But I’m sick of seeing people being rejected for being themselves. Sanctification is the road most traveled by plodding. While the example pastor in the article is someone we should strive to be like, there are many who can’t relate and who are searching to be accepted first, sin and all, the way Jesus did when He enters town and chooses Zacchaeus. Sincerely chooses, because He’s Jesus. He didn’t choose Zacchaeus to put a picture of their meal together on Instagram to remind others how holy He is, or because He was walking by Zacchaeus trying not to notice him before He felt a pang of guilt and consequently sheepishly asked Zacchaeus to grab a meal. He chose Him because He genuinely loved and accepted him, pre-repentance and all. I don’t remember the article so well anymore and I can’t be bothered to pull it up because I’m in a mall and free Wi-Fi is about as rare as a parking spot on campus, which is about as rare as a catching Mewtwo on the first try with a Pokéball, so maybe the author was more gracious than I remember. This is just my 2 yen.
The closest I’ve been to really roughing it is spending part of my trip in this small town that basically nobody goes to in the winter unless you’re going skiing or snowboarding at the nearby resorts. Supposedly, it’s beautiful in the spring and summer, when entire fields of lavenders and sunflowers dig their way out of the earth to bask in the sun. Too bad it’s actually winter and I’m not planning on skiing or snowboarding during this trip. Actually, I did go to this small onsen town on the outskirts of Daisetsuzan National Park. But I didn’t hike, I just walked around in the snow taking pictures. I did go to an open-air onsen. It was a spiritual experience. If you’ve never sat on a big rock in naturally heated water while snowflakes dance their way onto your head as you watch the stars twinkle and let your mind wonder about the human condition and the meaning of life, I’d highly recommend it. (If you think it’s weird to get naked and take baths with other people of the same gender, I don’t think we’d be very good friends.) Japan is a country known for taking these sorts of balance/contrast things to an extreme art level. I don’t know a whole lot about that though, other than tea ceremonies are supposed to be about contrast. I was just sitting naked in hot, semi-murky water that smelled like iron, a comfortable distance away from the couple of old guys who were there too, all of us looking up at the stars, feeling deep. It was all very spiritual.
I was talking to a friend while in KIX, waiting for my flight to CTS. I told him my vague vision for this trip was to free up my mind and get over my extended writer’s block. He asked if it’s writer’s block or laziness. I’d like to believe it’s writer’s block. I told him it’s writer’s block.
My main plan for this tiny town was to find this amazing, cozy, truly local coffee shop where they roast their own direct-trade beans from their sustainably-sourced farm contacts all over the world, where I would pretentiously order a cappuccino AND an espresso, drink them straight without grimacing, and then order a single-origin pourover, perhaps something African, no sugar or cream, thank-you-very-much, and then pretentiously sniff and cup the brew to perfectly analyze the mouthfeel and distinguish each earthy, fruity, chocolatey, nutty note, after which I would just write and write. I guess I’m sort of doing that. I’m actually not even in that town right now. I’m currently sitting in a Tully’s in Hokkaido’s second biggest city (not even a standalone Tully’s, but one that’s part of a department store) with a honey milk latte. You can’t see me, but I just shrugged. At least I’m writing. I’ve written more during this past week than in the past six months or so combined. Which isn’t saying all that much, to be honest. I don’t even know how much of this will end up on my blog. I’m just trying to take advantage of the momentary flashes of inspiration.
And so my blog has evolved to what I should have known it would turn out to be all along, more an open journal than an update blog. I might write another post detailing what I did after my time in Hokkaido is up, but it probably won’t be very descriptive. I do have pictures up on my Instagram, but you might know that already. Thus, my warning for my few readers: this is going to be my blog from now on. Sorry if it’s different from what you were expecting, but then again, I’m not sorry because it’s my blog.
Have fun living your life, I mean that sincerely.
But I’m a romantic through and through. Excessively sentimental and prone to bouts of imaginative wandering through the labyrinths of my mind. I don’t know if it’s my particular blend of Myers-Briggs components, but I am who I am.
I’ve been in Hokkaido for a full week now, with four days left to go. As with much of my life recently, I feel as though with each blink, another day has flown past. So dramatic, right? But I feel this way. My brain knows that that’s an absurd idea and if that were really true, it would turn into 2018 after something like five minutes. But I feel this way.
The way I feel means a great deal to me. I take my feelings pretty seriously, too seriously at times. According to who you ask, men both are and aren’t supposed to be in touch with their feelings. I think I am though, because I process internally. I’m self-aware, uncomfortably so. I notice things about myself and my mind and heart are in this constant battle to not say stupid things. I think about things without thinking about thinking about those things until suddenly, things finally piece together, because of my thinking. At first, I didn’t think it was healthy because I thought I had to be speak up in my group at retreats while someone plays acoustic guitar on stage or be super vulnerable in my small group and elicit soft murmurs of agreement and empathy from my peers in order to experience genuine epiphanies. But if there’s anything I’ve taken to heart during this past year, it's that I’m genuinely okay with who I am. I’m introverted and I like to ponder things inside my head. Accepting myself has been incredibly freeing. There are times when I have these almost out-of-body experiences where I’m taking a mental step back and looking at myself the way a parent would look at their child. I’m not crazy, I promise. I’m just finally learning to seek the diamonds in my own rough instead of focusing on the amount of rough.
Writing also means a great deal to me because it is the only way I know how to be “artistic.” If my life depended on my ability to draw, I think I would die. But over the years, my fingers have learned to translate the pictures floating around my mind into phrases, and put words to the feelings bubbling in my heart. I don’t think I’d be able to draw and paint a forest very well, but give me some time and a few pages and I’ll teleport you there myself. I credit my parents with nurturing this creative outlet early on in my life. I can’t recall particularly enjoying the instrument lessons and sports classes I had to take as a child, but attending those youth writing courses at CSULB a few summers in my elementary years were, without a doubt, life-changing. Those are heavy words, but the truth is the truth.
So because I’m a romantic and I like to write (I don’t believe I’m a “writer” just yet), I booked this week-and-a-half-long trip to Hokkaido to step in the likeness of those greats, writers like Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Twain. I have this secret desire to live a life like Chris McCandless, but to be successful in the endeavor. I want to be like Sam Gribley, stealing hawk eggs and carving out living spaces in the trunks of trees, making clothes from deerskin and trapping rabbits in clever homemade wooden traps. But my daily reality is very unlike Sam’s existence in the Catskill Mountains. Out here, I am sleeping in nice heated rooms every night, so heated that I don’t need to wear pants to sleep if I don’t want to. I like to tell myself I could still survive in the style of the frontierspeople of old, that I’d be fine if only I had a companion like Frightful.
(An Interlude)
I’ve been reading Blue Like Jazz again. Voraciously. I don’t remember the last time I got through a book this quickly. I think Donald Miller and I share the same soul. Like we’re actually the same person. But then I remember he’s a genius and so we are actually different people. It’s amazing how much I can relate to him and his experiences. It’s unbelievable that I only own Blue Like Jazz…sorry, Donald. This is my best attempt to describe why I needed to leave where I was, why I went to Alabama and Texas in the summer of 2015, and why I felt like I needed to come out here to Japan. And it’s not even in my own words, because for a long time (and possibly still), I couldn’t put it into my own words. I hope I’m not breaking any laws by copying such a lengthy passage, but then again, I don’t think Don is the type of guy who’d mind anyway. Here goes:
“I led the college group for a couple of years and enjoyed it at first, but it wasn’t long before I felt like a phony. I got tired of myself. I didn’t like to hear my own voice because I sounded like a talk-show host.
One afternoon, I made an appointment with my pastor and told him I was leaving, that I was going into the world to get my thinking straight.
“How long will you be gone?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so. Maybe,” I told him.
“Can you talk about it?” He looked concerned.
“No, not really.”
“I understand you need a break. Why don’t you take a couple of weeks off.”
“I was thinking longer,” I told him.
“How long?”
“I don’t know. Can you put a time limit on these things?”
“What things, Don?”
“I don’t know,” I told him, sort of staring out the window.
“Can you tell me how you feel?”
“No. I’ve tried to put words to it, you know, but I can’t. I’m just really tired. Mentally drained. I feel like I am jumping through hoops or something. I don’t feel like God is teaching through me. I feel like I am a fake person, you know. I say what I need to say, do what I need to do, but I don’t really mean it.”
“What does the real you want to say and do?” he asked me.
“I don’t know. That is what the trip is about.”
“Are you having a crisis of faith?” He looked concerned again.
“Maybe. What is a crisis of faith?” I asked him.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Yes, I want to go on a trip with Him.”
“You aren’t having any doubts at all?” he asked.
“No, I don’t have any doubts about God or anything; it’s just me. I feel like I am constantly saying things I don’t mean. I tell people they should share their faith, but I don’t feel like sharing my faith. I tell people they should be in the Word, but I am only in the Word because I have to teach the Word. I said to a guy the other day, ‘God bless you.’ What does that mean? I have been saying that stuff all my life, but what does that mean? Then I started thinking about all the crap I say. All the clichés, all the parroted slogans. I have become an infomercial for God, and I don’t even use the product. I don’t want to be who I am anymore.”
“So you think you should go away,” he clarified.
“Yes.”
“Where will you go?”
“America.”
“America?” He looked confused.
“America.”
“We are in America right now, Don.”
“Yeah, I know. But there are other parts to America. I’d like to see the other parts. I was looking at a map the other day, you know, and Texas was sort of brown with some green, a few hills, but then there were more green with big lumpy mountains. I’d like to go to those places.”
“Do you think God is out there somewhere? Out there in the lumpy places?”
“I think God is everywhere.”
“Then why do you have to leave?”
“Because I can’t be here anymore. I don’t feel whole here. I feel, well, partly whole. Incomplete. Tired. It has nothing to do with this church; it’s all me. Something got crossed in the wires, and I became the person I should be and not the person I am. It feels like I should go back and get the person I am and bring him here to the person I should be. Are you following me at all? Do you know what I am talking about, about the green lumpy places?”
The conversation went on like this for about an hour. I went on and on about how the real me was out in the green lumpy places. I wasn’t making any sense. I can’t believe my pastor didn’t call the guys with the white coats to take me away.
* * *
I supposed what I wanted back then is what every Christian wants, whether they understand themselves or not. What I wanted was God. I wanted tangible interaction. But even more than that, to be honest, I wanted to know who I was. I felt like a robot or an insect or a mysterious blob floating around in the universe. I believed if I could contact God, He would be able to explain who and why I was.” (Miller, Blue Like Jazz, 96-98).Yeah, I know my citation isn’t correct. But I hope you enjoyed that, whether you understood it or not. As I said, Miller is a genius. If you don’t understand him though, I don’t doubt it’d be difficult to understand me as well. I don’t mean to sound condescending, like I’m far beyond your mental capacity or something. It has nothing to do with that. I have friends I can’t understand well, though I love them. We just have our wiring connected differently. I don’t think I had it in me to try to explain this to everyone before leaving. I didn’t have it in me physically or mentally. Forgive me, but I am who I am. Obviously, there is much more after this that Miller goes on to say, but that is his story. There is more that followed in my story as well, but I’m ruminating for now. Maybe you can ask me about it if we meet up.
I’m also well aware of that article from TGC or DG or wherever with the title “Does Authenticity Trump Holiness?” or whatever it is. I read through it a couple of times, and I guess it’s written as balanced as it could be, considering the author’s answer seems to be “No.” While I do ultimately agree with him, he seemed to write off authors and creatives like Miller too easily. Blue Like Jazz was written in 2003, long before this own crisis of mine. This (seeming) clash of authenticity and holiness is not new. If you’re not going through or have never gone through this kind of crisis or aren’t cut from remotely the same cloth as people like Miller or me, of course this all seems slightly ridiculous, perhaps overly dramatic and unnecessarily sentimental. But I’m sick of seeing people being rejected for being themselves. Sanctification is the road most traveled by plodding. While the example pastor in the article is someone we should strive to be like, there are many who can’t relate and who are searching to be accepted first, sin and all, the way Jesus did when He enters town and chooses Zacchaeus. Sincerely chooses, because He’s Jesus. He didn’t choose Zacchaeus to put a picture of their meal together on Instagram to remind others how holy He is, or because He was walking by Zacchaeus trying not to notice him before He felt a pang of guilt and consequently sheepishly asked Zacchaeus to grab a meal. He chose Him because He genuinely loved and accepted him, pre-repentance and all. I don’t remember the article so well anymore and I can’t be bothered to pull it up because I’m in a mall and free Wi-Fi is about as rare as a parking spot on campus, which is about as rare as a catching Mewtwo on the first try with a Pokéball, so maybe the author was more gracious than I remember. This is just my 2 yen.
(End of Interlude)
The closest I’ve been to really roughing it is spending part of my trip in this small town that basically nobody goes to in the winter unless you’re going skiing or snowboarding at the nearby resorts. Supposedly, it’s beautiful in the spring and summer, when entire fields of lavenders and sunflowers dig their way out of the earth to bask in the sun. Too bad it’s actually winter and I’m not planning on skiing or snowboarding during this trip. Actually, I did go to this small onsen town on the outskirts of Daisetsuzan National Park. But I didn’t hike, I just walked around in the snow taking pictures. I did go to an open-air onsen. It was a spiritual experience. If you’ve never sat on a big rock in naturally heated water while snowflakes dance their way onto your head as you watch the stars twinkle and let your mind wonder about the human condition and the meaning of life, I’d highly recommend it. (If you think it’s weird to get naked and take baths with other people of the same gender, I don’t think we’d be very good friends.) Japan is a country known for taking these sorts of balance/contrast things to an extreme art level. I don’t know a whole lot about that though, other than tea ceremonies are supposed to be about contrast. I was just sitting naked in hot, semi-murky water that smelled like iron, a comfortable distance away from the couple of old guys who were there too, all of us looking up at the stars, feeling deep. It was all very spiritual.
I was talking to a friend while in KIX, waiting for my flight to CTS. I told him my vague vision for this trip was to free up my mind and get over my extended writer’s block. He asked if it’s writer’s block or laziness. I’d like to believe it’s writer’s block. I told him it’s writer’s block.
My main plan for this tiny town was to find this amazing, cozy, truly local coffee shop where they roast their own direct-trade beans from their sustainably-sourced farm contacts all over the world, where I would pretentiously order a cappuccino AND an espresso, drink them straight without grimacing, and then order a single-origin pourover, perhaps something African, no sugar or cream, thank-you-very-much, and then pretentiously sniff and cup the brew to perfectly analyze the mouthfeel and distinguish each earthy, fruity, chocolatey, nutty note, after which I would just write and write. I guess I’m sort of doing that. I’m actually not even in that town right now. I’m currently sitting in a Tully’s in Hokkaido’s second biggest city (not even a standalone Tully’s, but one that’s part of a department store) with a honey milk latte. You can’t see me, but I just shrugged. At least I’m writing. I’ve written more during this past week than in the past six months or so combined. Which isn’t saying all that much, to be honest. I don’t even know how much of this will end up on my blog. I’m just trying to take advantage of the momentary flashes of inspiration.
And so my blog has evolved to what I should have known it would turn out to be all along, more an open journal than an update blog. I might write another post detailing what I did after my time in Hokkaido is up, but it probably won’t be very descriptive. I do have pictures up on my Instagram, but you might know that already. Thus, my warning for my few readers: this is going to be my blog from now on. Sorry if it’s different from what you were expecting, but then again, I’m not sorry because it’s my blog.
Have fun living your life, I mean that sincerely.
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