When I spotted Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a tattered book exchange in a remote Argentine hostel, it didn’t occur as my kind of book. Kerouac always seemed too hipster, before the term even manifested itself in widestream English, too “cool”, too anti-conformity for the sake of anti-conformity for my tastes. But a few pages into it, one line jumped out at me.
“Are you going somewhere? Or just going?”
It seemed a question tailor-made for me.
Of course, I didn’t know where I was going.
The problem was further complicated by my wandering childhood. For most people, moving countries was an informed decision, driven by pain, or hope, sometimes both. It was a decision made through clenched teeth torn between wariness and anticipation. But for me, a kid who followed expatriate parents across three continents before the age of 17, moving was effortless and without the stigma of a life changing decision.
It was an ease that stayed with me into adulthood. The world was literally my oyster – I could go anywhere! But the freedom of choice presented a new set of existential problems. I had to keep going because I didn’t know another way of living.
I read that Kerouac wrote by gluing himself to a typewriter for months, fingers furiously dancing over the keys until words appeared on a page. On and on he wrote, and when he finally snapped out of the trance, On the Road was born.
That trance of extended reflection had always eluded me, mostly by choice, because I was afraid of what would come out. What did I really have to say to the world? Was it meaningful? Should I be reflecting on my own choices and making sense of them?
My writings – words carelessly scrawled on paper, frantic paragraphs typed in moments of gripping thought, inner conversations – are the furtive first attempt.
Musings of a Leaf 