Secluded Prowess

So here I am, a guy in a brown corduroy jacket and recent haircut, sitting quietly in a Starbucks with a green satchel and recently finished coffee at my side. But amid the simplicity of the superficial, the torrential winds of change billow by as I face the crossroads of life. For some reason, whenever I think of the word crossroads,  my mind flickers to some Britney Spears bubble gum pop movie that I saw on the shelf of some pharmacy years ago and I reflect on the awful disservice that movies like that give to the daunting realities of true crossroads.
 I sit here as my college career winds down and the blue skies of freedom beckon me through an open door ahead revealing open blue skies. It reminds me of a 'Calvin and Hobbes' imaginative dream sequence in which Calvin walks out of a door into the beautiful freedom of spring air but is shocked to find that his house is actually miles above the safety of the ground. He falls abruptly with a dramatic 'AAAAaaaaaaahhhhh' and then wakes up.
But the simplicity of childhood comic book dream sequences are but a fading wisp in contrast to the real questions that beleaguer my spirit. Questions as safety and the known battle the mysterious and eternal swirling grayness of the unknown. Deep questions of right and wrong, of expectations and safety.
Safety. 
The word that has beleaguered my mind for the last month and changed the future in my minds eye like a slide show on a dusty old projector. A slide of me teaching English in Europe is quickly switched with another in South Korea. Click to China, click to starting a DJ business, click to just getting into a funk.
I think that my favorite advice came from my professor and mentor Paul Bueno De Mesquita. After absently placing my overloaded and wary mind into his hands, to my surprise he responded, "You know, I'm kind of jealous of you right now, you have no responsibilities and the whole world right in front of you". And he was right, with one word  he handed me the world that I held all along, and with it a newly jump started heart, slowly but optimistically ticking away.
But it all comes back to one word, the creeping word of the hour. A word that will tuck you in way before your bedtime and spoon feed you chemicals that quietly dream away a life unlived. It's the deadly friend that will whisper sweet poetry into your ear until you hide from the world and it's terribly twisting concoction of changing colors,  caloric chocolate, and speedy surprises.

Safety.
I must recapture the adventure and desire that my college career left me without. I must become the man that I dream of becoming, one that I get closer to everyday. I want to feel the car crash and gallop towards who I am and who I want to be.
But something is pulling at my pant legs.
My integral work as an activist in a small state and a tiny organization that is brimming with such beautiful force and spirit that it sometimes burns through it's own encasing. An organization that has managed to bellow it's angst and desires into the ears of national malls and large state wide papers and news stations. I fear that I am necessary and without my energies it will go down the road that so many before have veered off of, the road of political self combustion, as intense light sabers of the mind run through clumsy but well meaning friends instead of the monstrous enemies who would delight in nothing more than that.
Fear.
I fear that if I take a leap and go to the strange and different world of teaching English abroad that I may hate it and be stuck in a year of waste, being depressed and lost in the turbulence of the daring that it will take to jump out of my prickly Winter nest.
But even stronger than the burning angst of fear and the warm beckoning of safety is the desire for flight, a desire to reignite a light that inspires me to run through the winking half smiles of safety and the cold calculations of fear to embark on a life well lived. A life of letting the pain unlock the doors to the beauty. A life of uncertainty becoming dependability. A life inspired. And a life of falling in love with the one man that started this journey with me and the one that will take my last gasping breath at the twilight. Myself.
From their plush chairs, Safety and Fear wink at me from across the drafty coffee shop , their shiny black striped suits a stark contrast to the white student loan papers they hold and the marriage equality bill that they tear up with a smirk, as they speak my mother tongue and hold a dirty smoking pipe. But my heart beats for something more as I quickly look away.

If it takes everything within me, if I'm going to go down finding it, I must leap. I haven't gotten this far to just lay down my arms to the gremlins that circle my feet and control me with their well practiced lies that they know will halt my flight.
Maybe it will take time in Korea to appreciate what I have here.
Maybe it will take time in China to appreciate other worlds and cultures.
And maybe it won't.

But I know that as I step out into the sunshine and with a shudder, free fall,  I have taken the road that only the brave can take and only the foolish can hide from.

Or maybe not.