All the answers

"So....", my buddy mumbled from the backseat, "what did you learn on your trip?".

"I can't begin to answer that", I replied without thinking. Staring forward through blinking white lines on asphalt.

"I thought you'd have all the answers", he mumbled as if disappointed that I was the same person, only a thinner and more removed version of my pre-trip self.

His disappointment mirrored my own.

Less than a week earlier I returned to the US after sixteen months abroad. Climbing, walking, seeking, eating, coughing my way through the worlds great mountain ranges and storied cultures. Quite a few of them at least. When I heard those words...ALL THE ANSWERS...that moment in a dusty Subaru on 1-35, I realized that instead of wisdom and clairvoyance I returned with my head full of questions. A vault of experiences lived but not processed, lessons taught but not learned. A measure of wisdom earned but hidden now. The days and events are by themselves luminous but together form a tangled knot, like pages of a great story, shuffled and bound again in disarray. Now, nearly a year later, the knot has loosened and the lesson is rising.

If I have began to understand one thing it is this: The forces that move us, inspire us, draw us forward, are the most important in life. To honor these forces is to live. I choose travel, but travel is not the answer. The answer is simpler. Find inspiration where it lay and choose always to follow it.