It would be a shame to go through life without ever experiencing the lightness of heart that comes with a solo one-way road trip. My early adult years were full of them. One of my many guilty pleasures has always been indulging in my own potential.

A solo one-way road trip is where you simply pick up and leave everything behind with the hope of finding meaning at your destination (or at least something different and possibly better).

It could be going to a new school or job, relocating to a city with an aim of finding yourself, or simply heading west to see what’s on the other side.

There must be no set return date and a willingness to embrace whatever life throws your way.

When these factors line up, there’s nothing like the feeling of that beautiful in-between moment: after you’ve shed your past but before you start your future. It is weightlessness on earth. The only things that matter are in your car or in your heart.

It’s magical. An intoxicating cocktail of hope and potential served in a tumbler glass of life in a barroom full of untapped dreams.

Nothing’s more alluring than that which may yet come.

Everything you see on a solo one-way road trip takes on a deeper meaning. It’s nearly impossible to be disappointed when you have no expectations.

I think back now on the places that I’ve gone and the experiences I’ve had and am amazed. Where did I get the confidence? Or was it foolishness? An arrogance of youth, or the luxury of a life entirely unencumbered?

I smile back at the twenty-year-old me who walked into the United States Senate as an intern knowing no one in the city and thinking, “Yeah, this is where I belong.” And at the nomadic campaign operative driving my truck into New Hampshire, Iowa, Virginia, and New York thinking I had something to prove and desiring to change the world.

Everyone takes chances in their twenties; if you’re lucky, those chances expand your sense of the world. But like every breathing thing, an expanding world inevitably contracts.

I’ve come to notice that life has fluid tides of responsibility that ebb and flow with time. This realization helps me appreciate the moments of calm, as I seem to be experiencing right now.

While I may not have the entirely unencumbered lifestyle of my youth, I’m pretty close and with significantly more to keep me floating when the tides inevitably shift.

I need these resources now because the truth is that I was never quite alone on my early one-way road trips. Like any good acrobat, the first thing you learn before attempting a new jump is how to inspect your net.

As daring and as carefree as I may have felt, I knew I was protected if I fell. My truck’s insurance was paid by Dad, Mom’s house was a safe haven I could return to at any time, and nobody cared back then if people in their twenties had health insurance (which we didn’t). Wherever I arrived, volunteers supported me with housing, heat, and food until I settled on my own.

When I finally came back home it was because Mom was sick and it was my turn to hold the net until the tides shifted once again. And when they did, I laid the solo part to rest and followed Jenny on a one-way couple’s trip to Texas.

Not everything’s worth leaving. Three years later we made our way north again and joined as husband and wife.

I’ve lately found myself feeling nostalgic for new beginnings, an itch my one-way road trips used to scratch. In springtime, days suddenly seem like more than mere continuations.

If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that new beginnings are always right around the corner: a new career, new opportunities, new columns every Sunday at 7:56 PM in honor of Andy Rooney.

Now that I’m a little bit older, it takes that much longer to get back up each time I fall, which means I think about each jump more before I leap. But the impulse still remains.

And looking back, that truck I had that used to seem so freeing now seems limited and small. It would make me sad if everything I cared about could fit inside a single truck bed; the world’s too big for that. I think I’ve always known it, but the younger me had to see it for myself.

I’m more likely to spend this summer circling my yard on a riding mower than to make another one-way solo road trip, as freeing and as beautiful as they are. And as I circle my acre-sized patch of land, I hope I’m just as excited by everything I see – my wife, my home, my garden – and learn anew that there’s nothing more alluring than that which may yet come.

 

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