The Ultimate Obstacle

I am broken. I have numerous little scars from the past week. Muscles I'd been using a lot are sore from the extra work they got. Muscles that were unworked which were required for new activities are sore. A slight sunburn here, an itch there, a wrecked shoe. And my stomach is upset because of some reason. Maybe milk and beer, and exhaustion. Maybe whatever, it's there. A lot of this could probably have been prevented with more care and more information, other things are simply the tough starting bit of doing something new. Still, I am afraid. Not from my bruising and sickness, these are passing and mild, and culminated together just in time for weekend rest, which is also funny: When you absolutely can not get sick due to situations, your body refuses to get sick in the name of survival. When I was away from home for a year I was afraid I'd get sick but I never did. but I did when I was back home for a week. There's something to be said about this Reverse Murphy's Law. But what I'm afraid is that these things will definitely happen, and when they will is unpredictable. Suddenly it makes sense of certain things: marriage, family, a house, a steady income, health insurance, and how they're perpetuated through our fears. They are the equivalent of staying home sick from school: You're in pain, yes, but it doesn't even come into your conception that there couldn't be a safety net of mom, food and medicine to compensate for this. In a different situation you could be out there by yourself with no one to rescue you but your sickly broken self. Thousands of miles away from home, if you have a home even, some people have nowhere to go back to. As an adult you're expected to make your own home and sustain it. I guess I really was sheltered. • What makes me more afraid even is the question: Is this an obstacle to the journey? It's hard to embark on a journey if you feel its specter of disaster outweighing its soulsearching vitality. What a tragedy would it be to have a terrible experience affect the perception of the journey, stunning you into fear of future journeys. • The key I see dangling is information. Break off from reading culture and focus equally as much on information. It's true that the leap of faith into the unknown is often vital to overcoming the often illusory fears of possible problems, and the mind can be more at peace in ignorance sometimes, but this is wrong. One has to look at information from the logistic point of view: Guides are merely the product of someone who got it wrong many times and learned from it. If one immerses himself in information it is a way to progressively reduce not the the possibility of trouble, but the amount, and know how to recognize its signs, and be able to counter, to trouble-shoot. • Alliances also seem feasible keys, temporary alliances, not marriages, not come-what-may pacts, but to find another individual, a stated goal, a deadline, a limit and a backup plan. Or etcetera. If people have each other's back, during a certain time-space endeavor they are quite invincible. This is what I haven't been doing here on the first leg of my journey with my trip partner who so generously allowed me to be ignorant in my leap of faith, with him being the Guide. And yet I am cumbersome, I just am and it's not merely fatigue. It may be partly that I'm glad to be out of a leadership role which I was trying to impose on myself beyond my nature. It may be that I'm an opportunist, and I'm always trying to get people to do things for me, to not work as hard, to come out wining with less effort. But all this is a bother, and hurts the energy. Being babysat hurts my pride but pleases my laziness. But from outside I know it's perceived as much worse. It's particularly foolish on my part when his giving nature constantly shows me that  people want to give back, yet I can't help myself. • I guess that's why I'm here alone today and he went for supplies while I recuperate, and why he didn't suggest that I go with him. So I don't slow him down, so he can rest a bit from my presence. I'm not complaining, my stomach still makes sounds pleading for more rest, and that's the right choice in the long run, but I'm still a burden. I feel like I want to pay him back, go the extra mile here and clean up, but I won't, because I'm lazy and all I care about is myself. • In a way that's why I'm glad that the rest of the journey I'll be alone (and why I'm so afraid of this sickness scaring me away). I'm at my best when I'm alone, I figure out how to fend for myself. I've failed a lot of the times, most of them, but always got a story out of it, and that's, after all, all I'm in the game for - I'm an Experiencer. No one for me to usurp for very long, just me and Movement. This makes me feel that, as soon as I start to have more successes than failures, nothing can ever go wrong afterwards. I'll be set (on a course). • Besides, in a short while the fears will go away when I'm not sick or broken anymore. All this fear and pessimism is just emanating from the broken state, and since it is a state, it is irremediably ethereal.