Locate yourself

I went out to play disc golf yesterday, and I kept losing focus on the game. My mind wandered off down every side trail in the woods. This Monday’s episode follows a few of those trails. We start with the poem you think you know. “The Road Not Taken” gets read as an anthem for bold nonconformists, but read the middle again: the two roads “equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” There was no road less traveled, not really. Frost isn’t describing a choice. He’s describing the story he already knows he’ll tell about it, “with a sigh,” years from now. The difficulty is the choice. But underneath it is a harder thing: knowing where you’re actually standing when you make it. From there we get lost on purpose. The way some languages orient by north and south instead of left and right, and how our ancestors located their very identity in place. Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and the terror of losing your self coordinates entirely. And the strange argument between Walt Whitman, who blessed the multitudes we contain, and Gurdjieff, who sat with a more accusatory tone toward those same sleepwalking multitudes. What I carried out of the woods were three questions: What are we actually, consciously choosing? Why do we spend so much energy distracting ourselves from ourselves? And why is it so hard to know who we are? And one small piece of permission, which is what we do here on Mondays. You don’t have to travel both roads, catch every fleeting thought, or unify the crowd inside you into one tidy self. You only have to remember yourself among them. Be the quiet one who watches the parade without climbing aboard every float. That’s the fixed point. That’s what it means to locate yourself. Listen above. Then, if you want, reply and tell me your one fixed point, the thing you orient by when everything else is just trees.The Difficulty lands Mondays (the long walk), Thursdays, and Saturdays. If this located something in you, subscribe and forward it to one person who’s feeling turned around. More at chadprevost.com. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadprevost.substack.com