For the first time in my life, I’m on the road. I’ve quit my job, given up my apartment and left Montreal for a month-long tour to launch my new spoken word CD. The plan is to hit eight cities—Halifax, Portland (Maine), Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal—all while traveling alone on the glorious Greyhound bus.
The thing I’ve found about traveling is that you have to let go of things more easily. I can’t carry stuff like I normally do—from little bits of garbage to my expectations of myself. It’s all happening so fast. The pace of the tour means that the emotional reality of each moment gets flushed away as the need to move on becomes urgent. Things can gather in a stagnant pool, but they are swept away in a river—I guess I would call it selective baggage.
In my work-a-day life before going on tour, I had luxurious amounts of time to dwell, to really weigh things. I would sit for long hours, journaling about this or that. With all this room to ponder over the last five years it’s become my habit to be, or at least feel, completely prepared for whatever I do—I decide on an action plan and write lists and double-check everything.
But on the road, I can’t prepare in the same way because there’s so little that I know in advance. I’ve never been to the venues I’m performing in—I don’t know if they have a good sound system, or whether someone will be working the door for me, or if the place is hard for people to find. Flying blind like this has forced me to be okay with ‘the best I can do’. It’s worn down the edges of my perfectionism.
Plans work out or they don’t, and then I’m onto the next thing. I’m utterly invested, but not as much in the outcome as in the moments I have to work with. It reminds me of that Leonard Cohen tune where he sings, “Forget your perfect offering / There are cracks in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” It’s true that I feel more alive like this, doing things more loosely. There’s more life in my words now because I don’t have as much time to think them over beforehand. Or afterward.
So, here I am, allowing myself to be human: I do a couple shows, I make some mistakes. I might get lost once or twice trying to navigate a city, and then I have to pack it all in again and leave for somewhere else. This expansion & contraction is interesting because I have to make constant decisions about what to move on with and what to leave behind. I’ve never “cleaned house” so much or so often. There’s really no time for the dust to settle.
It’s shaken me to purge so much from my life. Living this way feels like I have nothing left to gather around me—none of my usual creature comforts, at least. Everything is changing in my life these days…though, I suppose things aren’t so different from how they were before. It has always and only been me that I carry around, only now I’m learning how to do that with more selective baggage.