2023: On the Road

We shouldn’t ground our existence on expectations nor on the thrill of the road. It has to be something abiding, coming from deeper and within. I need to internalize the fleeting sensations.

I’ve been on the road a lot this year. It’s the last year before my corporate job robs me of regularly scheduled breaks, so I told myself I should take advantage of it while I still can. I wanted to see more of the world while I’m young, while my dreams still feel alive to me. When I think of myself this year, I think of Sal Paradise from On the Road. I think of how he says “the road would get more interesting, especially ahead, always ahead.”

It was easy for me to criticize On the Road when I first read it. Sal and Dean Moriarty are exhausting addicts who wave their hands in desperation, mumble senseless words, trample the boundaries of morality with a plain disregard for the cost of their actions on others. A selfishness that Kerouac’s narrative ambivalence is complicit in and acquiesces to. I thought they were vulgar and raucous, lacking in discipline and coherence.

Nearly one year since, I understand the pull a little more. The road really is exciting. Promise of a trip eases the boredom of today — the senior project that sits half-finished and the writing quotas yet unmet. Starting anew and embracing uncertainties are exciting. Just like how stumbling up Eigergletscher in clothes completely unfit for skiing and sliding down the Swiss snow is exciting. There is so much you wouldn’t know unless you go.

Sal and Dean’s fault, to me, is that they let the fever of expectations consume their journey, yet they refuse the labor required for a destination to materialize. They treat the road as a clinical cure for a spiritual ailment, forgetting that external treatments cannot fill an internal vacancy. “This madness would lead nowhere,” Sal admits about halfway through the book — a confession that their journey is fueled by a deliberate avoidance of reflection. Without a clarity on what they want to accomplish or who they want to be, their motion is bound to be directionless. The road is bound to lead nowhere.

In pursuing madness, they drown out the silence of their own minds with the roar of the engine, too busy to think. They use sensory overload to outrun problems they lack the discipline to solve. But motion does not liberate. True freedom does not lie in the absence of stillness, but in a self-transcending responsibility — the act of coming to terms with one’s life rather than abandoning it. Their problems are still there. On the road that leads them back, they remain prisoners of their own refusal to think. They can never outrun despair.

Now, there is no point in playing Socrates with Beats and persuading them to examine life. But I do see their story as a caution for mine, as a warning not to mistake motion for meaning, and called it freedom.

I consider myself a dreamer. I was drawn to the novel by a single, incomplete quote I saw in Chinese: “all that road going, and all the people dreaming.” But upon finishing, my favorite lines became what I consider to be the book’s most sobering proclamation: “the days of wrath are yet to come. The balloon won’t sustain you much longer. And not only that, but it’s an abstract balloon. You’ll all go flying to the West Coast and come staggering back in search of your stone.”

Life hasn’t unleashed its full wrath upon us. We can still float to imaginary heights with our balloons. But balloons pop, dreams shatter. At some point, we’ll become too careful, too comfortable, too afraid. We’ll fall back to our stones and return to reality. We shouldn’t ground our existence on expectations nor on the thrill of the road. It has to be something abiding, coming from deeper and within. I need to stay introspective when on the road.

A part of why I’ve loved the road is that it’s a place where I have no past nor future, only the present. When I’m on the road, I live in a transitory state — in the in-betweens in time where anything can happen. I stand amidst the ambiguity, holding on to my stone. The adventures have only made me more sure of why I started, more certain of my way. I now know the world is much more alike than it is different. The unknown doesn’t tickle me so. I am still at peace.

However, now is not the time to relinquish my dreams: the balloons have not yet popped, I can still fly high. I’ll try to keep them aloft until the day I die.

It’s just that I don’t expect the future to be better. I know this is already the best.