Guide to Agency: 1

A Road Agent walks when he/she can.

This is about two things for me.

Comfort, and Self Reliance.

Comfort is what keeps us in our place.

Self Reliance is what we can use to break free.

Comfort

It is simple to look at comfort as something that we need. That we need to be held close to the bosom of material wealth. That we need a TV, or a car, or a roof over our head or food. Sure we need things to survive. But how we obtain those things makes us up. And getting caught up in the rat race of material collections is an ever increasingly easy flow to get caught up in.

Every corporation, and person is trying to sell us something now.

Aside: In a lot of ways I'm trying to sell this too you.

I make it easy to read, (hopefully) decently well written. I add some pictures. I make what I think sound desirable. But I have no end goal. I don't want your money, or your adoration. But that is the beauty of being human, we are steeped in hypocrisy and there is nothing that we can do about it.

And that something is largely comfort. Eat until you are over full (you will get fat), so get the operation that will make your self image better (and then none of your clothes fit), so you go buy the new clothes (and now you need somewhere to show them off), so you go to the hip new club (and at the club you have to fit in so you buy the same expensive drink), and on and on and on. All searching for comfort and pleasure. Company after company leeching on your personal insecurities and foibles.

"A wealthy man's heart is a ghetto."

And because you are constantly seeking out the new comfort that you were just told you absolutely have to have, you are never comfortable. You have just been fooled into thinking that comfort is something to be attained. Not something that you have.

What about laying in the grass next to a lake with your love. What about wrestling with your kids in the ball pit. What about flashing eyes in the throes of passion. Or giggles at a well told myth. You don't have to pay a penny for a single one of those things. And yet they are all the comfort you will ever need.

There are necessities. But how hard do we really have to work to have them. Is a tent not a roof. Is bread not a food. We are soft and complacent, and we will never be able to really walk the road until we realize what self reliance means.

Self Reliance

It is easy to make this a trap too.

Self reliance doesn't mean that you are the only one that you can rely on. It means that we are the only ones that we can rely on. The self isn't really just one person. It is this network of people, this family that each and everyone of us gathers around us. Family, friends, lovers, children. They all make up the self.

Without them you are still something, and yet nothing all at once.

No matter how alone, or how secluded you make yourself. There will always be someone that cares about you.

An illustration: I was talking with a friend that was from a certain part of the state. And he had mentioned to someone else that was from the same part of the state that there was a hermit that lived in those parts. The two of them began to chat about him. And how he lived.

Just on some land.

In a cave, or trailer, or tent. I don't remember and it doesn't matter. But he would come into town a couple of times a week and buy some staples, and his whiskey.

What he is doing with his time, and his solitude don't matter to this illustration. His myth is in place, he is The Hermit.

What makes him that.

The people around him. The people that care about him. Because both men talked about how they would give him things like food, or whiskey. How an uncle would take honeycomb to him. He was cared for. Because deep inside we want to care for others. We want to be people that value others. We are often just to caught up in serving ourselves. He is a monk, a traveler that doesn't move. He becomes a personality to be talked about and cared for, just because he tries so hard to be isolated.

Self is you.

Self is your community.

And your community is whoever connects with you. Who ever burns with desire with you. Whoever you want it to be, even if they don't know it.

Those people are the people that you help when they are in need. That is where needs get met.

Or that help you when you are in need. That is where needs get met.

These are the people that will always give you real comfort. And that will walk with you.

Walking

Where does walking come into this.

It is a choice of how to live. It is a fact and a metaphor and a work of art all at once.

When you don't have a car, you take the bus, when you don't have the money for the bus you call for a friend, when they don't have cars, or money, you walk. The is no distance that is insurmountable. No place that can truly keep you out. Every day is a road that you have to wake up and walk down.

And I chose to walk it.

I chose to move from place to place at my own pace. With the people that I chose. In the land that I want to live in. And no fence can stop me, because I can climb it, I don't have to worry about roads because there is no car, so I can cross the fields if I need to. And when I'm to tired to keep going, or I'm out of food, or hope. There is the rest of myself waiting in the wings. The people that care for The Hermit. Because we are all one in the same, we are all one real person, alive and full of love, and all that we need to break free of our slavery is wake up and walk away. Hand in hand with those that love us.

I walk when I can.

File under Agency.