Searching Again for a Nation
I wasn’t intending to post about the Coronavirus. My plans to become location-independent and launch a real—not-virtual—series of travels to foster and track Third Act adventures might have been born during the pandemic, but they are not really related to it.
The idea to experience more of the world and not focus so completely on work did develop as a result of everything slowing down and my having more time to spend alone—like others–to sift the truly meaningful elements of the life I desire from the “busyness” and activities that had routinely defined my waking hours. And the isolation has forced me to face the fact that true connection is sorely lacking in my day-to-day.
My desires to hit the road are duplicates of what a lot of Americans—mostly younger than I am—have blueprinted for their foreseeable futures. But my plans have way more in common with John Steinbeck’s decision to travel the continent in a truck camper with a grey poodle for a companion at the dawn of the 1960’s in his Travels With Charley.
Steinbeck seemed to intuitively sense a change, a seismic shift, really, in America and his fellow citizens at a point of history that wove together the Civil Rights movement, fears of nuclear war, rapid advances in technology, politics and the rise of mass media, an unprecedented period of post-war economic growth, and a ripple effect from all of it in the culture, as baby boomers began to come of age.
Steinbeck was 58 and not in the best of health and may also have felt unsettled by the country’s new-found love affair with youthful vitality, expressed in the rise of rock and roll and personified by John F. Kennedy, who would defeat Richard Nixon—the old guard—to win the Presidency some six weeks after Steinbeck’s trip began.
Small wonder, then, that he subtitled his book “In Search of America.”
Today, another seismic shift is taking place, coalescing around drastic changes in our way of life since the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to, or maybe as a result of, these changes, there is renewed social unrest in cities, population migration away from large urban areas, a nearly obsessive dependence on new technologies and a bitterly divisive national election.
The U.S. is a vast and diverse country, with different states “opening up” from the pandemic lockdowns on different timetables. Our economy was at it’s most robust and is now wobbling along after the ravages of business shutdowns, but uncertainty lies ahead. The politics that divide us represent a kind of warfare between two differing versions of this country’s future and will last beyond any decisions on November 3rd—if indeed anything will be decided by then at all.
If ever there was an appropriate time to again go In Search of America, that time is now.
And that is what I seek to do, not unlike Steinbeck, although my actual road travels likely won’t start until after the beginning of the year and most likely won’t include a gray poodle.
But I can start my search for America and post about it now, before I actually set out in a car or van or camper or whatever and before the virus is conquered and before the ballots are counted.
I am starting 10 years older than Steinbeck, from a vastly different vantage point and I intend to focus on what’s meaningful for those in the Third Act of their lives—including mine.
Yet it strikes me as the perfect time to cultivate some new adventures and along the way to search out and coax out the very soul of a nation.