TRANSCRIPT
Recently, a friend asked me, “Where do you think you’ll be in five years, Daniel?” And it was an interesting question. My answer was, “I have no idea.” I don’t even know where I’m going to be in five weeks, let alone five months, let alone five years. It’s such a strange thing.
Many years ago, decades ago certainly, when I was a kid, I could have predicted. When I was in eighth grade, people asked me, “Where are you going to be in five years?” And I said, “I’m gonna be a freshman in college.” And I would have been right. I just knew it. I had a course set out for me, a trajectory.
When I was in third grade, someone asked me, “Where are you gonna be in five years?” I said, “I’m gonna be in eighth grade.” I was pretty confident. We were going to live in the same town. My dad had a decent job. We were rooted in this town. I could even point to the school: “I’m going to be in that school right there in five years.”
When I was a junior in high school, 16, 17 years old, someone had asked me, “Where are you going to be in five years?” I’m going to be a senior in college. I’m going to get ready to go forth into my life. I would have been right because that’s exactly what happened. Yet at the end of my senior year in college, everything started to change. I no longer knew where I was going to be in five years or five months.
Incidentally, it was exactly five years after college—those first five years after college, age 22, 23, 24, 25, 26—that were some of the most confusing and painful years of my life. Because it was the first time in my life where I had the opportunity to not be on a conventionally defined track. I didn’t have to do what my parents wanted me to do anymore. And in fact, my parents were so confused and screwed up, they didn’t even know what they wanted to do half the time.
For me, it was like, “This is my chance to not be a good little boy, not be a good little student, not do what all my friends were doing and go to grad school and become doctors and lawyers and scientists and MBAs and all the other fancy things they were doing.” They were all on the career track to make enough money, get enough status, end up getting married, start building a house, buy a house, buy an apartment, have kids, and I didn’t want any of that.
The problem is, I didn’t know what I wanted. Actually, what I wanted then is very similar to what I want now. I wanted to explore. I wanted to explore the outside world and then more so, even then now, in a way, I wanted to explore myself. And the reason I think more so then than now is because I knew myself so much less. Now I feel like I’m a cave that’s so largely explored. There’s still more exploration. I definitely still do more exploration and I learn more and more about myself.
But back then, it was like I was just stepping into the cave for the first time and I was like, “What is this?” There were so many things I was learning every day and every week. It was an absolutely profound, sometimes terrifying, often very painful, but often very joyous and thrilling experience. And so it was really my time to explore. That’s what I did for five years.
It was in that five years I had a couple of wonderful girlfriends, mostly for a very short period of time, where the arc of the relationship was not that long. But it was like there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was so much beauty, there was so much hope in it, so much pain and loss too, for them and for me.
For the first time in my life during that period, I experienced what it felt like to be suicidal, to wonder if maybe I should just kill myself and end all this. It was so horribly painful: terror, sadness, rejection, confusion. A lot of the exploration, well, it led to dead ends. I made a lot of mistakes, a lot of kind of screwed up, mostly self-destructive kind of stuff, mostly because I was ignorant. I was trying to follow what my heart said was right, and sometimes my heart, because of the history of my childhood, the history of my confused background and my family’s system, was mixed up.
And now I’m very grateful for that time. Sometimes back then, I just wished I could have been stable, wished I could have just been normal, or maybe even without quotes, just be a normal regular person who wasn’t doing so much exploration. Instead, I was figuring out how to put down cement roots into life, never have to grow and change and be so uncomfortable.
I’m trying to think probably 30, 40 nights hitchhiking, ending up sleeping outside, sleeping at rest areas, sleeping out behind gas stations. It was like, this was not what my fancy college education with my degree in biology prepared me for. This was not what graduating at the top of my high school class prepared me for: sleeping next to streams out in the forest, waking up with people around me, dogs around me, coyotes around me, all sorts of awful things, stepping in dog poop and not having an extra pair of shoes and not having any water to clean it off with.
And I remember adults once upon a time saying, “What are you going to do with your life, Daniel?” During that period of five years when I was so confused, “You have to pick a direction and go for it. Don’t be so non-committal.” What they didn’t realize and what I did realize is that at some core level, I was very committal. I was committed to me. I was committed to my evolution.
And when I looked at them, I realized they didn’t even have that. So no wonder they were looking so externally, planning their course of life. Because if they didn’t plan it externally with such confidence and rigidity, they would have had to face the terrified little child, insecure little terrified person inside of them that had no clue what to do and what direction to go in.
I think so many people, all those people I went to college with back then who all became so fancy and rich and important, and families and houses and money and bank accounts and 401ks, so many of them were just terrified little children. Terrified. And they were doing all this fancy external stuff as a defense, as a distraction against having to look within.
And there was some part of me that believed, “I’m doing it right and I’m doing it better than them. I’m doing something that’s better for me in the long run.” It was really a long, long, long-term investment.
I remember one of my friends, I grew out of him, a former friend who got an MBA, multi-millionaire now, fancy guy, telling me, “Daniel, you’ve saved three thousand dollars.” I’d worked as a waiter and saved money. He said, “Be smart, invest it. You have to invest your money. You have to invest it. This will grow. The economy’s doing well. This is a time to invest. This is important. Set aside one-third of it for your retirement.” Like, retirement? Retirement? I’m spending my days hitchhiking.
I remember what I told him, though. I said, “I am investing. I’m not investing in money. Money is not my concern. I want money to live. I want money to survive and pay my way. I don’t want to mooch off other people. But I’m investing in me, in my growth, in myself as an evolving person.” And I didn’t say to him, “Maybe you should consider that,” because I knew there was no point.
So am I just diverting from that question, “Where am I going to be in five years? What am I going to be doing?” Or maybe I’m actually answering it in a kind of roundabout way. So let me answer it directly, as directly as I can.
In five years, if I could have my druthers, if I could have my fantasies come true, I’ll know myself better. I’ll come back and read my journal entries from today and I’ll say, “Daniel, I respect what you were doing, and actually, I see where you had more growth and I’ve done more growth. I want to keep learning. I want to keep learning about the world.” There’s a few places…
I would yet like to go and see, just because I want to build my knowledge about the planet, build my knowledge about other cultures, languages, religions. I’m fascinated right now by the former Soviet Union. What an unusual country in the history of the world! I want to learn more about what happened there. I mean, I’ve been to Russia, I’ve been to Belarus, spent four and a half months in Kyrgyzstan. But so many other countries—what, 17 former Soviet republics? I’d like to see the Caspian Sea. I’d like to see the Black Sea. I’ve never seen them. I’d like to learn more Russian than I already know. I’d like to go more deep into Southern Africa and learn about that—South Africa, Namibia, Botswana. I’d like to see, not to do safaris, but to live with the people, to bring my guitar, to learn more drumming, to learn more about the blues, to speak more French, to learn maybe more German.
[Music]
I’d like to become more me. I’d like to embody myself more—more generous, more altruistic, more honest, more outspoken. I feel like I’ve become pretty damn outspoken in my life, but I believe I could do a heck of a lot better. Maybe I can even be more succinct in my outspokenness, get right to the point more, less distracted, less afraid of the terrible consequences. I still live with a lot of fear of negative consequences, rejection from the world.
In five years, well, I’ll be 53 then. What will I be like? I’ll be more bald, my hair will be more white, my body probably won’t be as strong. I hope I’m still healthy then. I want to keep every day trying to exercise, go walking every day—3 miles, 5 miles, 8 miles, 10 miles, 15 miles. I want to keep eating well. I want to keep developing my friendships, meeting new people. But I think fundamentally the key for where not only I’d like to be, but I think I’ll be more in five years, is more healed, less traumatized, more aware of what happened to me, more aware of the consequences of the bad things that happened to me, the consequences in my life, and more resolved in them. More aligned with the person I always was underneath it and now am in a more manifested way.
And if I could have my hope, maybe I will find some new—I want to say bigger, but maybe it’s not bigger that counts—better, more direct, more honest, more clear ways of using my life to be an inspiration to other people on this journey.