Not about two feet.

My walks have traveled restful of late. Despite the tendency to procrastinate on work or wane toward pangs of inadequacy, my daily and nightly travel is filled with a single, previously unidentifiable emotion.

Content.

For those of you who are new to my bloggings (or to me in general), you should know that these walks are often the most pleasurable part of any day. You'll find that against your better judgment, rain or chill, my vessel is these strong legs and not your charitable ride home.

I've always appreciated long walks, parentheses in an otherwise living run-on sentence. My early walks were sporadic, impulsive, and emotionally cathartic (following a similar trend as my personal writing). But when I started college, I learned to love the routine of daily bipedal travel. I lived at home with no car then. My high schooler body packed its share of baby fat, and it took only a semester to claim my current tiny frame. Beyond physical health, my walks became a scene of introspection, of reflection and self-criticism, where often I gave my pain a forum. I listened to music that gave that pain a tone, a mood.

When I started graduate school, both resentful and alone for the first time since I moved to Kentucky, I learned to trust my walk as a dear friend. The travel became a companion, and I stole time out of my busy graduate student life to care for that friend and nurture our newfound worldview. I quit sociology for 1-2 hours every day and gave myself to other matters. It became about love and longing primarily. With the lock click of my apartment door or the first step from Patterson Office Tower, I slid deep down into melancholy and just felt the world. The despair was lovely.

I lost the walk for a while last year. I moved back home; I had real interpersonal intimacy to care for as I lived with friends and family, and I channeled my feelings to them. I regained a social understanding of myself, a picture that could not be disassociated from those I loved. I walked less. I wrote less. I lived more.

Alas, I grew apathetic in my job, with my talents of writing and engaging the world stale, and so I chose to go back to school. What a cruel contradiction that the struggle between labor and intimacy must always swing one way and rarely both. I either cannot have my family (read as those I love), or I cannot participate in the world beyond in a way that satisfies.

But this new place, with all the stress of 450 miles, finds me of a different quality than my first foray into graduate school. It took a day or two, but when the routine walk settled in, the familiar pain did not. The unmanageable pressures that I lambasted in some of these blog entries, for the most part, are forgotten. For once, the walks not only refocus my priorities to include non-academic aspects of living, but now reorganize my experience to a new purpose, a new state of being: one of comfort, one of content.

Let us recount the historical antecedents of this new found ease.

I can actually mark a single moment when this frame of mind came to be. You might have read the pretext in my blogs "Imposter" and "Choosey grad students...." where I broke down in a near anxiety attack over the expectations of this life I've selected. The practical Mike came in, selected an appropriate course of action (namely, what work I could and could not finish). I concluded a paper that was the primary source of tension (I posted that too), and the moment I e-mailed this blubbery academic monstrosity to print on campus, the adrenaline drained, my body warmed and I felt good. Rather than read another book like I knew I should, I went to lunch with my friend William. I didn't care. I breezed through that day and the next day and the next week and then this week. I stood at the wake of a broken thunderstorm; destruction abound but a sense of hope renewed. I have accepted what I must do here to survive or maybe my body just collapsed, but the world has remained warm and sleepy ever since.

This was a potent moment - so much so that I can mark it as the origin of my October mood - but I think there are more important things at work. I have made friends here. Though I am not always enigmatic (and often awkward) in my new social world, I am proactive and quick to make people consider me. I've gone out every weekend, often with different people. Perhaps more important, I have not fret as I might have at UK. I've not worried that my new friends would find me unpallatable. I'm easy and relaxed, even if they are not.

It might seem commonsensical to say that these new folks are more fond of me as a result. It's hard to say. People tend to like honesty, right? Unfortunately, I still find myself out of place, while all the time accepting my new clique. Par for the course for any group but my family back in Kentucky, social events are mired with drunkenness. I'll save an exploration of that topic for later, but it is hard to find one's place as a sober individual among drunks. I maintain that social handicap, both frustrating and proud, which prevents connecting with the intoxicated as they might connect with one another. More than this, I find myself in a pre-existing network, forging relationships with individuals while forcing myself onto the group culture....a disjointed intimacy at best.

And these two observations hearken back home for me. A place where I've built my own community in the last decade. We (and I speak of Mikey's House) constructed a group dynamic from the ground up. I feel I had no small part in this. When I touch new lives and that touch is sensuous and invigorating, I pursue a relationship. I make things happen. For every single person I love back home, we share a unique understanding of one another, apart from the group itself. It's marked by that first intense moment of communicative intercourse (one that makes a lack of the physical sort more tolerable).

I remember one night after disc golf on the square when all my normal friends went home and some guy named Gordon remained. We chatted casually, and spontaneously, almost as if we'd sought each other all our lives, four in the morning rolled around and we were friends. And not just new friends; we were close friends, almost best friends. I knew it immediately. We are quite different, Gordon and I, but the worlds in common created something sweet (sorry if this is too homosocial for you there, Gordo).

And with these separate partners, I enter into triads (particularly with a couple and myself), and I become a peice of their bond. Sage and Colin, Katie and Tony, Steven and Katie, etc. I know them apart of course, and I could describe for you how Sage and I connect over absurd conversation and how my relationship with Colin comes alive when we share pop culture, listening to music or playing video games. But I could also tell you how I know us together, as one unit, with such a complicated (and in some places, embarrassing) history: all the times I've slept on their couch or we sang Alkaline Trio in the car or I listened to one complain about the other. And beyond this level, I could describe for you how the dynamic shifts when Heidi comes along or when Nick and Ross show up. Then I could tell you about Christmas or Thanksgiving, where 20 someodd friends, all of which as individuals share with me something peculiar and configurations of each bring a new style to my life, but in total, we convey something entirely fresh and simultaneously familiar. For my part, the assumption of sobriety, along with a corresponding disinhibition and humor toward everday life, brings solidarity. Solidarity with a qualifier no less powerful than familial.

And if you know my family history, this is a reactionary and quite intentional redefinition of family (though not to say I don't love those who are actually related to me).

My walk is also important because it gives me time to call home, to connect back to my family, natural and redefined. And with new boldness, security with myself and the friendships I'm forming in Columbia, I assume that the new will always and forever pale in comparison to those deep histories. My comfort comes in knowing that no circumstance will ever match my Kentucky life. I am so fortunate in my friends, and in these phone conversations, I've come to remember the most important quality of Mikey's House, one that my egotistic interpretation often fails to consider: reciprocity. I don't just depend on them; they don't just keep me sane and fill my life with meaning....I do the same for them.

A phone call from Tony, which started on my walk and lingered till five in the morning reminds me that I am needed, not just needy. I hear that New York City fills the void with no more success than Columbia, Missouri.

A shorter call from Colin about an Old Navy pants sale does not articulate mutual need so clearly, but unlike Tony and I, Colin and I do not always speak out our admiration for one another. Yet his yearning for family is no less salient in that conversation than my four hour dialogue with Tony. And Colin only told me to buy some pants.

Christ, I miss Kentucky. But I have chosen a path. I walked away from my home, and many of them may not understand why because I will never have anything as good as what we are, but I carry them with me in the soles of my shoes. I've finally become cognizant of that fact, and so the difficulties of my life in Missouri, the burdens of professional development and making friends in less than ideal settings, becomes a source of contentment. I face the world with a certainty and courage that is ONLY possible because I have so many wonderful people missing me back home and in their own treks abroad.

It's funny how every moment becomes an existential crisis, where our immediate demands disguise the experiences that make enjoyable life even possible; that beyond the terrifying present is a pleasant history, is a walker's retreat in poor weather, and good people to spend the rest of my life with if I tire of the walk all together.

-Mike