The next morning John was again up very early, and all of a sudden had a huge desire to get out of New York. The city would always have memories for him, but right now he knew he was too susceptible to the emotional wreckage these memories could bring him. He had done what he came to do, and for now, it was the end.
He thought about what he was going to do. He had a number of patients in Chicago who he knew would be curious as to what was going on with him, but he didn’t feel like he was in any shape to go back to work. He had drawn great strength from being a therapist, and a part of him even wondered if the pain he was feeling right now might be something he could use in some way down the road. Right now however, it was simply too raw.
With no real agenda or sense of having to be anywhere, John decided to point the car towards Kentucky. He had lived there briefly as a younger man, and remembered the incredible colors of the Cumberland Gap that he had seen once while driving through. It was a memory he had revisited often in his life, and he had always felt an odd sense of longing to return there one day. He also needed to go to a place that had nothing to do with the memory of his wife and daughter, and right now, Kentucky seemed like a good idea.
John drove most of the day without stopping, feeling somehow that he was going to find something in Kentucky that he was supposed to experience. He realized that he was retracing the steps in his life, and thought again about reliving his live over and over again. Another part of him wanted to go backwards as a way to try and make sense of his life, and try to find some way to observe that it had some kind of meaning. He thought about what Kierkegaard had said about how life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward. Right now he took no stock in this. He felt an intense desire to go backwards.
After hours of driving, he stopped for a moment to research the best places for fall foliage, and decided on a place called Pine Mountain Kentucky. His only familiarity with the area came from the internet and watching the TV show “Justified” which showcased life in the little clans of Eastern Kentucky. It was a world he was almost totally unfamiliar with, and right now that seemed particularly enticing.
He found a little bed and breakfast at the base of one of the hiking trails and checked in. He planned to do some serious hiking into the mountains today to see if it might provide some clarity. He felt a little like one of those kids being sent off to an Outward Bound school to see if he could kick his habits and find some self-sufficiency out in the wild. Whatever worked.
After purchasing some supplies in the little town, he began his hike up into the hills, not really having any idea how his life had taken such a turn. He thought about his time in Kentucky as a young college student, and in particular that sense of longing he had when he had driven through the beautiful tree-lined hills and valleys. He had once made a mental note to come back and truly see how these people lived. Now he was here.
As he ascended the small mountain, he thought about something the author C.S Lewis had called “tantalizing glimpses.” Lewis was referring to these little moments in his life where he experienced moments of great clarity, which seemed to pass rather quickly, never to return. Lewis wrote a great deal about the idea of longing, and, despite the fact that he had never shared the author’s Christian beliefs, John had always been strangely fascinated by the idea.
Lewis had offered that one such explanation for these glimpses was that God was showing us a little bit of his divine plan in these moments. John’s own journey with spirituality had been a complicated one, but he did agree with Lewis that there was some kind of spiritual communion that could be found in nature. John had felt it and experienced it. As for the idea of a Divine Plan, he was a little more skeptical about that.
On the other hand, John had always felt like he had been spared in his lifetime. Despite the fact that he had spent years drinking heavily and doing all kinds of other awful things to his body, his health had remained intact, something he had always considered a bit of a minor miracle. Meeting his wife and daughter and putting their family together also seemed like some stroke of fortune way beyond luck to him, although now he wasn’t so sure. He wanted to believe in something, but the jury was very much still out on what that might be.
As he reached the top of the mountain, John saw that there was a young couple sitting at a picnic table, and he felt an odd pull to go and talk to them. He had been living almost exclusively inside his own head for the last several days, and he was beginning to miss the day-to-day validation of human contact that let him know he was actually alive and not dreaming all of this.
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