Yabba Dabba-Doo!

So, I’m driving.

Not like, as I type this, but I’m in Indianapolis, spending the night before finally arriving in Detroit by way of Los Angeles.

This car, prior to my ownership, had never left the state of California. Well, that’s my uneducated assumption. The original owner lived in Santa Barbara, and the car came with full records: locally purchased, meticulously maintained, and driven 11,500 miles over the owner’s 20-year tenure.

I’ll hit 17,000 miles when I arrive in Detroit, with over 2,000 of those earned during this cross-country journey, which has been a great joy.

I’ve never been a road-trip kind of guy. I’m the guy who travels across the country because I need to get somewhere, and I do it as fast as possible.

Detroit to New York. Detroit to Florida. Detroit to Los Angeles.

Every time, it was 100% about arriving with the quickness. But on this trip, I’ve learned something about slowing down. And it’s kind of ironic, because this is the first time I’ve driven a distance in a convertible sports car.

I’ve been writing a lot about these things recently, and forgive me if I’m belaboring the point, but they’re constantly on my mind. Just as the value of things and my relationship with things are.

But take a minute to soak this in:

My goodness.

America is amazing.

What a privilege it is to live here.

The expansiveness of the country we call home is not fully experienced in daily life, unless you drive a semi for a living. Or traveled by horse and carriage out West for the Gold Rush.

We moved slower back then. We traveled further by more difficult means. By horse. By foot. And while there was lots and lots of pain in traveling, they saw more, experienced more.

Maybe humans eventually decided we need to experience less. Let's speed up so we can get past all the literal shit on the road.

But as things got developed and made “nicer,” maybe we’re better served slowing back down. It’s easy in modern life to move so quickly that you don’t have time to appreciate the place you inhabit.

Have you explored the state you live in from end to end? Have you explored your country from coast to coast? From top to bottom?

The home we have in our bodies can also be an under explored landscape.

I’ve lived in nine different states across America, and I’ve already driven from LA to Detroit, back when I was in my early twenties. I lived in the same body and inhabited the same mind, but I was a completely different person back then.

This trip is revealing to me the work I’ve done. Not the self-congratulatory kind, but the fundamental shift in intention around how I transport my body from point A to point B.

I’m learning to make the journey the destination, even though my destination is full of crazy activities which I would normally rush to get to.

Today—well, now it’s yesterday (I told you these things take a while to write)—I got lost in a conversation, well, a lecture, but I felt like I was part of it, with my yoga teacher, Rebekah Rivera.

I’m doing a virtual 300-hour yoga training with her, and there is zero yoga in the way people think about yoga. There is no physical practice. No asana. It’s yogic philosophy, history, mythology, meditation, breathwork, and brain science.

It’s wonderful.

And in the conversation, I reflected on my teacher’s musings about the Buddha. I’m definitely not enlightened like the Buddha, but his struggle to find teachers to continue his personal growth resonated with me. He spent a lot of time searching.

I’ve searched throughout the country, seeking schools, cities, jobs—places where I could learn how to become the version of myself that I wanted to be.

The Buddha’s journey to enlightenment eventually took him beyond the teachers who could take him further. He stopped searching outside himself, sat beneath the Bodhi tree, and resolved not to rise until he discovered the answer he had been seeking.

There, he discovered perhaps the most powerful lesson of all: the greatest teacher is found within yourself.

What struck me was the idea that searching for knowledge outside yourself can eventually lead you back to yourself. The absence of someone instructing you forces you into self-investigation, exploration, and discovery.

So now I’m learning to see my inner light and listen to my intuition.

Through yoga, we’re reminded that we inhabit a body, but it isn’t what makes us us. It’s a vehicle. One that allows us to experience the Grand Canyon, stand in the desert, drive through strange little towns, sit in a car for eight hours, eat, sleep, and keep going.

After a day of driving and reflecting on the incomprehensible expansiveness of the Grand Canyon, I began to feel like I was discovering a space within myself that was equally vast. I was just peering over the edge. Admiring from a distance. But excited to climb into the canyon.

The body, like my car, is a vehicle for something more than transportation. It can be a tool for discovering the expansive place within it: the self.

I thought I was driving my car from Los Angeles to Detroit for an art show.

But for this trip, I gave myself four days instead of white-knuckling it across the country in two. I stopped. I looked around. I let the landscape reveal itself.

With the time I gave myself, I experienced a truth about living that’s arguably more important than the extraordinary moments to come, which are the reasons I’m traveling.

The larger landscape within me wasn’t found because I went looking for it, but because I created the conditions for it to reveal itself.

I gave myself time to travel. Space to experience. And then it happened.

That’s the special bit.

It’s the same magic I’ve experienced in my art practice. My best art comes from cultivating the conditions for art to arise.

My practice is learning how to make space for art to develop rather than simply focusing on how to make things. Now I’m practicing how to make space for living, so that I might find the expansive self that resides within me instead of flying past it every day.

Maybe that’s the lesson.

Maybe the journey is simply uncovering what was already there, rather than arriving at the destination.

And maybe giving yourself enough time and space for that discovery to happen is the work.