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Hello! It’s Halloween night, about 9pm, as I start typing this late night letter to you from Lux, my favorite downtown Phoenix coffee shop. However, the atmosphere in here’s a bit off tonight. A full, ambitiously costumed staff is mostly standing around in what was surely anticipation of a big night (the place doubles as a bar as well), but there’s about half the usual crowd and a general lack of hubbub in here. There’s a light melancholy and it all feels a bit anticlimactic. A rough transition, but one nonetheless, this coffee shop seems almost a metaphor for the past couple of months of life on my end. Ever since returning to my hometown in “the valley of the sun” to attend flight school, I’ve felt a bit flatlined by this sea of suburbs and the drawn-out, expensive, outside-of-insurance-coverage process of passing the FAA First Class Medical Exam required to fly for a living that I’ve been at since August. A comical example of the vast difference in cost of a life lived inside vs. outside economic systems, I paid more for my first half-hour consultation with an FAA-approved neurologist than I did for an entire summer in Hawaii (flights included!). Fortunately though, at my final overly priced doctor’s visit last week, I learned that my bout of meningoencephalitis at the age of sixteen—the very near-death experience that sparked this grand ole’ exploration and blog and has landed me here tonight typing these words to you—has not clipped my wings! I should be finally cleared for my first flight lesson in another week or two. I am very glad about this. To get real honest, this time back in Phoenix has been largely conflicted and uninspired. I’ve had great trouble writing this October, and apologize, for I have no articles for you this month. I’ve also discovered the structure of the book I’ve worked at the past four months is flawed and in need of a significant re-frame. Among all this waiting and paying and suburban living, I’ve found myself frustrated and far from the excitement that I’m used to greeting the day with lately. I don’t mean to complain (it doesn’t seem the best use of this opportunity to write you), but we have to cover this in order for me to try and share the gift hidden within these problems of late. Ready? Here it is: Over and over again, I’ve discovered my frustrations are largely hangups of, or lapses in, awareness. Even if there’s a better place to find myself than suburban Phoenix, even if the words just won’t come out, even if there’s nothing I can do to move my medical clearance along but pay large sums of money for inches forward among weeks of waiting—I’ve discovered that my awareness doesn’t have to remain hung up on these certain problematic details of my experience. The sun still rises and sets. Reflections still play across the glass. I get to eat food. And drink coffee! And start real estate photography businesses. I get to read books and breathe and take part in the grand procession of things. The thing is, while I’m sipping my coffee, or doing anything else, my mind gets stuck on these certain problematic details that, when I consciously try to spread my awareness around, I can see makeup but a tiny piece of the totality of my experience. Our minds snag to different degrees on these problematic parts depending on their severity, but the rest of the world is still there humming along as wonderfully as always. As so brilliantly suggested by the quote atop this article, we can draw innumerable pictures with our awareness because it is so small in so vast a thing. It’s like we’re always looking through one of those cardboard tubes from the center of a paper towel roll—but we point it only at the thing that bothers us and not at the ten thousand other things we might examine or love or discover. So, I guess I just want to say, don’t forget you can point your paper towel tube wherever you want. And that while ignoring your problems won’t solve them, a staring contest with them doesn’t help either. As always, I appreciate you pointing your paper towel tube this way. Til next month! With love and stoke, Ethan
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