Find Your Wyoming

Several weeks ago, I was talking on the phone with a good friend of mine, who has an insurance job in Dallas, TX. I wanted to know if he enjoyed his work, if he woke up every day excited to go to the office, if this was what he wanted to do. He laughed and said, “well, it pays the bills.”

We make countless decisions in our lives, all of which send out ripples, some good, some bad. At twenty-four, I’d already broken the one promise I’d made to myself when I graduated high school six years earlier—I was never going to move back in with my parents. Yet here I was, unemployed and with no real idea of what I wanted to do. Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew that I wanted to live an out-of-doors life; but with a college degree from a prestigious university, and under the burdensome yoke of college loans, it seemed like that wasn’t a real possibility. But I kept coming back to a video I’d seen back in high school, in which the British philosopher, Alan Watts, queries the audience, “What makes you itch?… What if money was no object?”

In the previous couple months, I had given up a job offer in New York City, another in Washington, D.C., broken up with my girlfriend of two and a half years--the same day that we’d been looking at engagement rings--and (eventually) lost one of the best friends that I’ve had. That would be my year-old Great Pyrenees pup, who I’d raised from a 10-pound fur-ball into a 100-pound tangle of energy and joy—intelligent, sweet, caring, and always down for an adventure, we did everything together.

I talked with military recruiters, briefly convinced that that was where I belonged. And in between, I went on adventures with my friend Pat and my pup, to new haunts in New England, and old ones in the mid-Atlantic states. Again, I turned to that video of Alan Watts—what made me itch was the solitude of the woods, soaring peaks and wind-rustled plains, unbridled rivers and glassy lakes, endless blue skies and roaring thunderstorms; in short, the magisterial power and unparalleled beauty of the wild.

One of the central tenets of stoicism, and many faiths from Christianity to Buddhism is letting go of common attachments, being the “master of [our] fate, the captain of [our] soul.” Why not throw caution to the wind and say the proverbial “fuck it”?

A week before departure, it became clear that I would likely have to make the drive west without a definitive housing situation; so, what to do with a nearly 100-pound puppy? My parents couldn’t take care of him; they have a dog (not to mention a middle school girl and two high school boys still at home) and a huge playful puppy wasn’t in the cards for my dear mother. It wouldn’t be fair to leave him with friends, only to take him back, once everyone got settled. If I was going to give him up, it would be forever, to a family that I knew and trusted. My second monumental goodbye of the summer. Another best friend gone.

I packed a tub of books and a couple duffel bags of clothing into my sixteen-year old yellow Nissan Xterra and drove almost 3000 miles across the country, leaving behind everything I knew. When I pulled out of the driveway, he watched from the front window, his forelegs up on the sill, as he always did when I drove away, anxious for my return. 

It’s not easy starting over. But we shouldn’t be afraid to cut away attachments and leap into the void to make a change. Why wallow in mediocrity, living each day just to get through it, “working for the weekend,” as Loverboy so aptly put it? Follow your passions, find that itch, and find your “Wyoming”; where you'll be free of the judgments of others and free of the pre-packaged lives handed out by the down-trodden who came before us.