The cage is in the eye of the beholder.

I recently took a trip to Kauai. The sun was warm and strong, and after a hermitic Alaskan winter it encouraged the old skin I had been working off to finally shed.

This vacation was unlike any I’ve had in recent years: I needed it. All the healing I’ve been doing lately brought me new energy and I tried to “do it all”. Six months of that and I was plugging the drain, filling the kitchen sink and then stepping out of the shower to a flooded floor enhanced with bits of blended cabbage.

I always wonder how people can accomplish so much. I guess I’m not there yet. My brain needs more time. I’m still just getting the basics down: an inherent sense of assumed survival.

My favorite sport has been turning everything into an opportunity to face discomfort. I seek opportunities to prove to myself that I can be trusted to survive. Distrust has been my cage. I am controlled by needing to know.

I tried to turn Kauai into a sporting event. I tried to backpack around, camp, hike and hitchhike. I was too exhausted to play, and after coming to terms with this fact, I resorted to comfort: a hotel and a rental car. It felt good to spread out and to be at my own mercy again.

The next day I met a man. He told me tales of his life. WOOFing in southern Italy, backpacking around Pakistan and Iran, spending 8 months in a Tunisian jail for watching a political video and finally, having moved to Hawai’i 10 years ago with just his backpack and learning to live off of the land.

He owned his car, a boogie board, a fishing pole and a machete, but not much more. He climbed the coconut trees, picked fruit in the jungle, fished on the shore. To me, he seemed free.

But this man longed for a wife, for some land, for a place he could grow his own food and relax. For this man, it was a far reach: he was addicted to the freedom he had found; to the lightness of owning nothing and being attached to nothing. And of course, he was broke. He longed to settle down, but had an insatiable urge to move. He wasn’t at peace, he was trapped in conflicting desires without a budget or skill to support the former.

At first, I admired this man and the freedom he had found, but then saw his addictions: cigarettes, detachment and living for the pleasure of the moment. He didn’t have what I wanted. He wasn’t really free.

If I didn’t want what he had, what did I really want then?

I wanted to know how to survive, yes. I wanted to be self-sufficient, of course. I wanted to be free of the burden of being tied to location. But those were all things that this man had. And honestly, so did I.

I didn’t want to live out of my car or in a tent. I didn’t want to live with almost nothing financially and having no choice but to trust the creator to provide what I needed. I didn’t want to live that life, but I wanted to be comfortable in that life.

I guess what I really wanted in my new skin was the same thing I’ve always wanted: the peace that comes with faith and to be able to trust myself. I don’t have to throw myself into all of the walls of the cage to do that. I don’t have to do it alone. I just need to ask for the right key.