Fortune Cookie Signpost (A Manifesto of Sorts)

A man grows up in Greece, knowing he's Greek and then goes off to fight a war somewhere in the East, fuck if he knows where, and ends up king of the Punjab where he hears Buddhist sages talking and eventually becomes regarded as a Bodhisattva, knowing he's a Bodhisattva. Came here as Menander I and left here as Milind the Savior. Ioannas Fokas became Juan De Fuca and sailed for Spain, and now has a tectonic plate off the coast of British Colombia named after him. And Giuseppe Giribaldi lead revolutions in Urugay and Italy, but in between the two he captained a ship that hauled poop off the coast of Chile. No, really, while in exile from Italy for being a bit of a dangerous element, Giribaldi was broke and had worn out his welcome with wealthy Italian expatriates, so he thought, "hey, why not, I'll get money by shipping guano up and down the Pacific coast of South America!" This actually would eventually take him to China, then to Boston, then back to Italy where he would unify the peninsula and become immortalized, but before he could do that, he would have to be captain of a ship full of bird feces.

Every land has had its archetypal great person - the US has George Washington, England has King Arthur, China has the Yellow Emperror, Rome had those two kids sucking on wolf tits - but every great person is part of so many great lands. Great people are footloose people. Great people leave their mark wherever they make a stand, or, in the case of Genghis Khan, leave behind an entire golden horde of illegitimate children. (Fun Fact: Geneticists have calculated that Genghis Khan won Evolution by having the most children of any human being ever!) If there's anything to learn from history, it's that to realize your potential, you got to be ready to move! And, at times, you might find yourself neck-deep in feces.

"Your sanity and your destiny are often found very far apart." That phrase popped into my head on mile eleven of a sixteen mile run, which is what I did with my Sunday mornings back in my old life as a competitive runner. At the time I made the obvious yet humanly shortsighted connection that it pertained to my run at that moment, or even my life as a runner. To achieve my potential, I thought, I must be willing to endure pain greater than my sanity can bare. But it's larger than that. So many people have fallen by the wayside of their destinies because they have refused to let go of whatever tethers them to the world with which they are comfortable. Family, friends, a slice of geography you know, customs, language, the sense of a place you've become adjusted to, might all need to be abandoned.

Marco Polo set off across Asia not knowing what kind of land he would end up in. Some Polynesians driven mad by war or famine pointed their canoes north into open ocean and thousands of miles later found Hawai'i. Alexander set off with a loyal phalanx and said he would march until the end of the world. Columbus said that he wouldn't reach the edge of the world and proved he was right, instead opening the gates for people, products, and diseases to be flung both ways across the Atlantic. Dirty-minded French trappers chased the beaver all the way to the Rockies without ever knowing where they were going or what it was they would end up mapping out. The Red Army marched 8,000 miles, thinking each day might end in total annihilation of not just their army but their ideal. And some day some intrepid bastard will say goodbye to everything he knows and loves, to be lost forever to the relativity demons, as he volunteers to be the first to touch down on some far-flung exoplanet. And who knows what wonders he'll find.

Personally, I can only hope that the bulk of my own adventures lie ahead of me. Society tells me that the bulk of my youth, my time to explore and make mistakes, is behind me. And maybe I haven't made enough mistakes. Yes, I've failed, yes, I've fallen short of expectations. But I don't know if I've ever been drifting. Never really had to duck my parents growing up, because I didn't do anything that far from the narrow path. Never complicated in any real way, only confused about the things people do in their normal lives. But I know that I have to make a lot of mistakes to succeed the way I hope to. And I know from these great people mentioned here that I'll have to abandon attachments to any place or people, and I'll have to be neck-deep in shit sometimes to boot. I know this from my fortune cookie I received the night before I left my hometown to go into the wide world of who knows, which said "You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily." I know this because I spend hours looking at satellite images on Google Maps of places I could only hope to see but still desperately want to experience with every fiber of my being.

And the mind! You can travel so many places horizontally but the mind can travel vertically, leveling up each time it learns something, reads something, experiences something, processes something. If we are to believe the David Foster Wallace Principle, which states that the more intelligent a person is the more easier they become depressed, your sanity doesn't level up with your mind. It stays put. "Your sanity and your destiny are often found very far apart."

Not that I could ever to be Giribaldi or Juan De Fuca. Or, for that matter, Tesla or Picasso or Ellington or Churchill or Scorsese or Asimov or Seinfeld, and certainly not David Foster Wallace. But like every bullheaded asshole in their early twenties, especially those who think that they're artists, I'm on a mission to be the greatest human being I can, and to make something that upgrades all other human beings who come into contact with it. I only hope that I can have my assortment of misadventures and character building activities. (But not activities engineered to build character, like trust falls and making ice cream with a crank while your grandpa lambastes your generation.)

In times of uncertainty the great ones are those who have been willing to throw down everything. And in an uncertain future, some of us also have to be the ones who will throw down all attachments. I'm already a man without a culture, so why not be one without a country or a homeland, maybe sometimes even without an ideal. Because it feels like the floor is dropping out from under me (or maybe the airlock is opening up) and I must be ready for the free-fall, which hopefully won't land me in a ship full of guano.

"Your sanity and your destiny are often found very far apart." There's a fortune cookie for you right there.