Photo: Costa Teguise, Canary Islands, Spain
I’ve been obsessed with travel since I was a teenager. Perhaps it was because of the financial poverty of my youth, I felt trapped and was looking for an escape. I must clarify that the poverty I mentioned was in fact purely financial. My youth was otherwise beautiful in that I grew up on the upper West side with Riverside Park and Central Park in walking distance. My neighborhood was intensely multicultural, and it was a time before PlayStation-like sleeping pills and cable TV. Consequently, kids grew up on the streets playing games- Skelzi, stickball, stoopball, handball, two-hand touch football, ringalevio, basketball- all day long. We learned to communicate, fight, negotiate, how to strive for greatness, and how to lose. We were in fact poor financially, but we were also extremely rich culturally.
Nonetheless, I was looking for a great escape. I first looked to comics (the ultimate escape for my young mind was to discover that I was a superhero!). When I discovered that this was unlikely, I turned to sports and literature. I absorbed and was fascinated by the lives, experiences, thoughts, dreams, and adventures that authors wove from their life experiences and imagination. Literature taught me to dream, not only of foreign lands but of those lives, experiences, ultimately leading to aspirations of being an artist. I wanted to be an artist in the grand sense of the word, where the very expression of oneself is art. At the age of 16, I decided to be an artist á la Jean Cocteau, who was a writer, playwright, filmmaker, and artist. I came across the word dilettante at the same time, and I associated it with my grand vision of what it meant to be an artist, and it stuck. I would be a dilettante!
It was a grand dream and aspiration, but reality clipped my wings. In light of my mother’s total sacrifice for the education of my sister and me, and her desire for us to become professionals and “succeed” in life, I succumbed to the fear that such a grand, albeit “unstable“ life vision of being an artist, was not practical. I did what seemed like the correct, secure thing to do at the time: I became a doctor.
After a rich 31-year career in emergency medicine, I am grateful and have absolutely no regrets. I feel privileged to have touched so many doctors-in-training as an academic emergency physician, and patients in their moments of need. This experience taught me to be a humble servant, to graciously share my knowledge and experience, and most of all, compassion for the human condition.
One of my first thoughts when I so rashly quit medicine just a few weeks ago was that I liberated myself from prison and was now free to embark on my journey as an artist. I have in fact made a good start: I’ve written two novels (“The Twin Flames, the Master, and the Game,” and “Love in the Time of Coronavirus: 20/20 in 2020”); a screenplay (“The Peacemaker,” for which I placed as a quarterfinalist in both the New York and Los Angeles International Film Competitions!); and I’m almost finished with the sequel for the “Twin Flames” novel. However, it suddenly hit me like a brick on the head that these were not separate journeys. Rather, it is all one path, one journey. It was never about going from a poor little boy whose father was assassinated in Haiti, experiencing poverty with a single mom doing the best to provide for her two kids in New York City, trying to find an escape via comics, literature, and now quitting medicine, living an artistic life and traveling the world. It’s all the same thing- one journey, and it’s all taking place in the mind, which projects all of this onto the screen we experience as life. Puta qui pariú! What a mind trip!
This is also a form of travel, n’est-ce pas? It is the inner journey, the only journey. I somehow knew at a very young age that this reality I was experiencing didn’t add up. There was something wrong. Perhaps it was looking at those “Roadrunner” cartoons on Saturday mornings, wondering why Wiley E. Coyote never stopped to ask himself why he was so obsessed with catching that particular bird? He obviously had the resources to purchase all that equipment from ACME. He could have had as many birds as he wished. Why that one? It didn’t add up!
I subsequently realized that in all my travels, adventures, accomplishments, distractions, what I was really looking for was an escape from myself! The self that seemed so inextricably bound to this illusory world. I discovered in a very circuitous manner exactly what one of Jim Jarmusch’s characters stated in his 1986 film “Down by Law”: “Isn’t it interesting that no matter where you go, there you are?”
It was always about the inner journey.
Hello Richard........very well stated, I too have the same ideas as yourself. We are very similar, thank you.