A Journey

6 min readMay 14, 2021

At the beginning of finals week, in an attempt to relax my workload, I wrote a somewhat rambly article that I was prepared to submit as my final project for my class entitled “Art and the Sacred.” The article was about my take on the sacredness of storytelling. That was going to be my article until 7:30 PM on Thursday (of finals week, mind you) when I was starting my journey on a Greyhound bus on my way from San Fernando to Visalia. I was near San Fernando because I grew up on the other side of the valley so my plan was to come down from Half Moon Bay and visit since the trip from SFV to Visalia was more direct. So why am I going to Visalia? Politics! Literally, I’ve been mildly involved in (aka a keyboard warrior for) the Libertarian Party since about 2015. I wanted to go to the National Convention and meet my crowds of internet friends I lovingly sparred with on Facebook… But I was in high school, miserable and broke, and that was never going to happen. So here I am, starting a little smaller with a State Convention, trying to get involved again. But on this journey, I’m inspired by a couple of things: my personal journey of trying to be involved and the readings for this class.

I guess I’ll start with my personal journey since I’m still just feeling excited about my destination. Lately, I’ve been struggling with a bit of a quarter-life crisis. I’ve been in college on and off for 6 years which feels like way too long and somewhere along this journey I’ve realized that I got into tech for its applications. In particular, I’ve had a lot of ideas and no skills for a long time. While Make School gave me skills, I don’t have the freedom in time or money to do my own complex thing. So I have to find a new way to love tech… And ever since Dominican hosted 3 Day Startup, all I can think about is doing social good via tech. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of companies I’ve found hiring software engineers to build tools for social work. So… how can I work on the issues I care about? Politics! I know, how do I reconcile the capitalist nature of the LP with something so often dependant on government funding? Well, no ideology is perfect, but I do have to go with the closest one to my heart, and for me, it’s gotta be the fastest-growing political party in the US.

Another big motivator for me getting more political after 6 years of never volunteering is that I have a major fear of missing out. My FOMO kind of activated when I was getting more casually involved by going to online events and such. I saw so many people with minimal qualifications and experience just owning what they want to see done in the party. This has multiplied exponentially since joining Clubhouse. If you aren’t aware, Clubhouse seems to be a place where people have live voice chats with strangers about one of three things: tech professionalism, politics, and relationships. It’s wildly professional, not safe for work, and controversial at the same time. It’s amazing. So far in the realm of politics, I’ve mostly been listening to people whose names I’ve seen via social media. These people are so all-in in the party and they get to influence the direction taken just by showing up. It’s inspiring to me.

At this point in my journey, I have my music at full blast and we’re passing some spots that look vaguely like civilization. It’s time to dig into some readings. Although I assumed I’d gravitate toward the names that are familiar to me, my first stop was The Journey by Nahid Angha. I felt that being on a journey myself, this would be most appropriate. I quickly learned that the Journey being discussed in this was a much deeper Sufi journey called Seyr va Soluk. This journey features a departure from a limited self in pursuit of “eternity: all knowledgeable, compassionate, and merciful” (7). It may sound like these goals are ambitious, but I relate to that level of ambition as well. In probably the most inappropriate comparison, there’s a line in Lena Dunham’s HBO series, Girls, in which her character Hanna expresses her desire to feel everything. While Hanna wants to feel everything to be a better writer, a selfish desire, I related. I thought about the amount of insight that would give me, to solve worldly problems and to understand people on a person-to-person level. I wouldn’t equate my journey to that of the Sufis because my path is much less clear, and likely less spiritual in a traditional sense. Still, I relate to some of the fundamentals for the journey that Angha writes about. Knowledge of the Self — this is something I’ve been pursuing via therapy. Understanding myself is an important step to growing because growing requires recognizable change. Rules for the Observant — there are rules I need to follow to grow. For me, these may include very personal things I’m not willing to discuss here, as well as somewhat obvious things such as that I need to take more (but not every) opportunities to grow. These aspects I strongly relate to.

In The Art of Pilgrimage’s forward by Huston Smith (Art of Pilgrimage is by Phil Cousineau), Smith says the object of pilgrimage is “to throw down a challenge to everyday life” (ix). In a very literal sense, the journey I’m on is making my everyday life more challenging by interrupting my finals week. But beyond that, I’m not sure what I’ll be like coming out of this convention. I’ll be mostly the same obviously, but what will happen to my priorities. To me, pilgrimage has a very religious connotation; images of Muslims flocking to Mecca come to mind. But personally, I think of something we say celebrating Passover something like “but next year, we hope to celebrate in Israel.” I’ve never really understood the call to a holy land. The closest thing to me is the desire to return to Disneyland or wanting to go to the 2016 LP National Convention instead of watching it via C-SPAN. This book goes on to tell the story of The Call and an important aspect of it is that it makes the reader consider if they’d answer the call (32–36). Perhaps I believe in too many varying, conflicting things to ever hear the call. While this is troublesome, I think it’s also essential to understanding a variety of points of view, so I’m not sure I’d want to change it.

Lastly, I wanted to revisit The Conference of the Birds, originally by poet Farid Ud-Din Attar and adapted by Peter Sis into an illustrated book. In this story, discussed on NPR, a group of birds set out on a journey to find “a king who has all the answers” — only it turns out that “the only authority the birds need lies within them” (Staff). To me, self-governance is important for growth. It’s latent in the rules spoken in The Journey — you have to define your own rules and that will guide your path.