My travels, my taking time out to learn to listen to my gut may be
laziness, un-American, a bunch of weirdness or worse. Spending my savings doing what? And many friends and family see me in a less kindly light than they once did. But something keeps me on this path.

I have known a man who was executed for a crime he did not commit,
executed by people working hard to ignore what they knew was true. He was an interesting, scarred man with a heart and kind, pained eyes and a very hard life even before his mistaken arrest. The people who contributed to his execution were ordinary people with kids at home and televisions and some were generous through their churches and did kind acts and worked hard.

I wasn't used to listening to my own gut. I became confused about what I knew as truth and about what the system was insisting wrongly was truth.

I too have caused harm in my blindness to my own injuries and needs and truths.

It does not hurt to go to the ocean and gaze to the horizon, to be still. It does not hurt to wait a few minutes in bed each morning, and get in touch with the information your body has collected and
assembled. It does not hurt to take time off from your work to listen, to learn, to breathe.

What if becoming self-aware is the most unselfish, generous journey you can choose?

Something keeps me on this path. If I am a slow student, I will just be slow.