20 Days To Dudes: "Comfort"

When I was 16, my parents decided to separate while living in the same house. My dad moved upstairs to the guest room and my mom stayed downstairs in the master. Many evenings I would come home to the sound of soft rock emanating from the clock radio in my mother’s room. I would stand outside her door and listen: Christopher Cross, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac. I imagined that she had somehow selected the songs, a playlist of encoded messages to anyone who passed close enough to hear them. Often the things we never mean to say carry more weight than our best-rehearsed lines.

Many years later, during the touring cycle for The Luxury Of Time, my life became a blur of disparate locations, hangovers and adrenaline rushes. The relative speed of it all complicated things, especially my first long-term relationship with a woman, which began to deteriorate at a speed directly proportional to the length of time I stayed on the road.

It was all getting a little difficult to explain over the phone. Cities had begun to take on emotional identities; they all made me feel certain ways based on an intuitive equation that factored in weather, urban infrastructure, population density, current economic conditions and overall walkability. Pittsburgh felt like disappointment, L.A. was freedom, London… complete and utter insignificance.

I once saw a news feature on a female business traveler who, upon landing in a new hotel room, would immediately begin decorating and personalizing it with pictures of her family, recent magazine clippings and other detritus that reminded her of home. She was a very successful advertising executive or graphic designer or… I can’t really remember, but I do recall that she claimed to loo-oove to travel. To decorate hotel rooms by taping magazine articles to the walls. She wore stretchy pants, and she seemed very lonely to me.

Why do we want to impose a memory, a familiarity, onto the adventure of the present moment? Nostalgia is nothing but a goddamn dirty trick, one that never really works. Whenever I choose the past over the present I end up cheating myself out of a new experience. I was once taken to a Brazilian restaurant in New York that was known for its fantastic meat preparation. I ordered a beet salad because I was homesick and it reminded me of my wife’s cooking. It was terrible.

Cheap comfort can be found in a lot of places while traveling: a photo, a TV show, Facebook, a phone call, a barstool. But true comfort comes in being at peace with the fact that nothing ever stays the same for long. Wherever you go, there you are. Life is about adapting and evolving and knowing that you have the strength to handle whatever the present moment is throwing at you.

Selah.

Full disclaimer: I stole the title “Comfort” from my buddy Matthew Ryan. I hope he’s forgiven me.