Update to Go as Far as Possible (December 2002) Of all the articles I wanted to update around Rosh Hashanah, this one stuck out the most – in particular then ending, which was a copout. The essay was about my years-long project of locating myself on a ‘spectrum' running from the safest and most traditional at one end, to the weirdest, most ‘out there' on the other. At the end, I refused the limitations of the spectrum metaphor, and said that the whole model needs to be thrown out and replaced with something less about centers, margins, and norms. I said that

when all is really understood to be possible, the Romance of wandering is replaced by a confidence of silence. Going as far as possible ceases to be the purpose of life, because once you've effaced the idol of the self, you never really go anywhere, and there is no one to do the going. . . . Rather than a place of centers and edges, I want to exist in a wide plain of being, with only horizons instead of boundaries, and the confidence to go as far as possible, or be as still as possible, or exist anywhere on the matrix of possibility.

All well and good, but there are still choices to be made, and all but the most enlightened of us will feel the consequences of our decisions. These days, for example, I'm trying to decide between moving to Brooklyn and moving to upstate New York. A simple geographical decision on one level, but actually a more fundamental life question. In the city, I will live largely as I have been: engaged socially, spiritual sometimes, writing but also playing around with boys and parties and culture. In the country, I will be less socially busy, more involved with my writing. There will be less culture, but as I developed in The Ghost and the Machine,* more ready opportunities for quiet and reflection.

I turned to one of my meditation teachers for advice in this dilemma. I explained to her that, as I saw it, it was bad faith to deny that, at 32 years old, I am still very much about "making something of myself" in the conventional sense, as well as playing, having sex, drinking the marrow out of cultural life, etc. To go off into the country might help my mind be quieter, but shouldn't I honor the part of me that is still full of yang -- and young -- energy? And, I continued, the reality of my personality is – as developed in Go as Far as Possible – that I like to straddle the fence between convention and non-convention. Yes, I go to Burning Man, and believe that everything is God, but I also look "normal," have a boring two-days-a-week job at a software company, and am very much involved in the mainstream economy and culture. Moreover, I continued, this makes me a good teacher, because, having one foot in each world, I can translate between the two.

My teacher's abridged answer to all of that was: Bullshit. What's holding me in New York City, in my software job that I have increasingly come to hate, and in all of this convention, is fear. My rational mind fears letting go. My ego fears the judgment of people on the grid – judgment I already feel or project onto my many law school friends and colleagues who have become very successful professors, lawyers, and statesmen. They are writing constitutions of other nations, or publishing op-eds in the New York Times; I am writing in Zeek. Sure, I hate myself every time I get too conventional, but dammit, I want success! So it's all fear.

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* I can't help making one additional ‘update,' to The Ghost and the Machine, suggested by my friend James. I was concerned in Ghost with why it seems so much easier to ‘see God' in nature than in the city. While I gave various spiritual answers having to do with ego, desire, and humanity's creative potential, James – ever the friendly skeptical check on my enthusiasm – pointed out that humans, for evolutionary reasons, are calmer when they are around a water source and vegetation. We are hard-wired to be happy in a physical environment likely to meet the basic conditions for our survival – which, on the physical-geographical surface, Manhattan doesn't.)