Horse With No Name

I literally lost my identity a few evenings ago on the half-hour bus ride from Denver to Boulder. It went unnoticed until a phone call came the following morning inquiring whether I recognized a certain credit card charge. No, of course not, the card has been with me in my wallet, right here  . . .  oh, wait. Thus began an odyssey flickering between mild panic and existential pondering.

You might not be aware of the many logistical steps to be undertaken with a missing wallet/purse: lock down/replace any credit/debit cards; implement a credit freeze; obtain a new driver's license; etc. That might sound fairly routine, except for one thing -- your life becomes provisional if you can no longer prove who you are. But for locating my passport, my life would have become a hell on many fronts.

That experience, however, led to an odd sort of reckoning -- I felt strangely free for the moment, untethered by who/what the contents of the wallet represented me to be, a kind of invisibility. There was a palpable lightness as the past had simply become an imagined construct (even the threats that my grade school infractions would go on my "permanent record" now rang hollow). Driving (w/o license) to the DMV was now riding in the desert on a horse with no name 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain.

The illusion turned out to be fleeting, however, as I beat myself up for possible carelessness in the past and the prospect of identity theft in the future. Nevertheless, even if brief, those moments of non-attachment -- to the past, to the future, to my very identification -- definitely stood out. It was like being in my own witness protection program.

We might share instances in which our own lives, real or imagined, were defined by the present. The daydream of an alternative unattached and untethered self is not restricted to the young. Middle managers and successful professionals alike have been known to chuck it all and literally reduce their lives to a couple of backpacks and light out on the territory. That territory may simply be a state of mind.

By the same token, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, perhaps an anthem for the dispossessed, voluntarily or otherwise. It could also prefigure a certain kind of death, the death of an ego.

(Please note:  no focus article accompanies this session so we're on our own)