Category Archives: insomnia

wanderlust

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There is an affliction some of us have. It’s called wanderlust. It’s compulsive and powerful. Some of us learn how to work around it, but it’s still there causing insomnia and impulsive weekend road trips.

Those of us so afflicted see a desolate road or a dark highway and there is a pull in our chests to take that road wherever it winds. The feeling often starts with a musing of “where might I go if I could go anywhere?” Perhaps some time in the evenings is spent tracing routes on GoogleMaps. I used to have a road map of the United States hanging on the wall across from my bed. I would lie in my bed creating points from A to B to C to D to E, when I should have been getting my good nights sleep for work the next day.

Then there are days where tracing routes on a map isn’t enough and I have the tingling in my muscles that make me get up and GO.
Sometimes I have a companion for these jaunts.

and sometimes it’s just me.

I’ve had this feeling for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my mom and I drove from southern Illinois to Berkeley, California and back more than a few times. For many years, my favorite sunrise was looking out past a field while standing in the parking lot of a Howard Johnsons somewhere in Oklahoma. I love that forever sky.

I’ve done that trip and many more. A lot of them alone, starting at age 17. Once I get past the first day of driving, I settle in to a comfortable rhythm. That is where I love to be – after the first day of settling in, and before the anticipation of immanent location arrival. That is when I leave my stressors behind and have no particular destination except for the next place to gas up, eat, or find lodging.

priorities

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The word, “humane” means “having or showing compassion or benevolence.” and it originates from “late Middle English: the earlier form of human….” and more etymology describes the word as meaning “having qualities befitting human beings.”

“Inhumane,” obviously, is the opposite. It means “without compassion for misery or suffering; cruel.”

This all presupposes that humans are the stick against which compassion or benevolence are measured. That humans are the epitome of goodness and if you are not behaving well, you are obviously lower than human.

Are we better because of our opposable thumbs? Our ability to poison large swaths of water or radiate huge populations? Is our wonderful humanity defined by our polluting of the oceans? Is it because we send probes into space and can make fire? We are truly an amazing species. We can make new limbs with 3-D printers , can contact anyone around the world within a matter of minutes. We have harnessed energies from the earth and the sky, we love and care and play.

Are humans truly the measure of “humane”? I think the word is a misnomer. We war, we torture, we create lives that are “nasty brutish and short,” then create laws in order to avoid that. We torture animals for our pleasure in a state of cognitive dissonance. We can generally agree that this is not compassionate nor benevolent. And while not every human is awful, we have a built-in capacity for such atrocities. Because of this ‘built-in’ capacity to commit great acts of misery how can we say that humans represent the highest good that is “humane”?