On The Road Again

On The Road Again | First Aid Kit

I first heard this song on NPR's All Songs Considered. It opens up with a bass and a drummer track. It's the most basic simple time beat in the world. I must have heard it thousands of times, except this time, I don't know where it's going. Then the vocals come in with hardly a new melody, but perhaps instead with the most applicable and genuine lyrics I've heard this year. The song is over forty years old, but I'd felt like I'd been listening to the chorus of every Johnny Cash folk song in my lifetime. Then, like a police siren, the music is gone. The lyrics fall silent, then the instrumentation, and I'm left with the silence of only my own thoughts.

Now, imagine a college student trapped, by nothing except his own home. The same four walls as we live within our covid-centered lives. Remove the news outlets and the racial injustice. Remove mom panicking about the cancellation of colleges. And what are you left with? Your own thoughts? But what are they without the news, your friends, and your family?

This is where I find myself now. I came into my workplace at 10PM. I ate the remainder of my Chipolte burrito bowl and was excited to find space and clarity. But when I remove all the distractions in my life, the result is a scream.

I want to get the f*** out of the confines and the limitations of the world. And what do I do? I continue to live in it. But what do I really want to do? I want to be bold. I want to be myself.

The motto of the Air Corps Tactical School was Proficimus More Irretenti—"We Make Progress Unhindered by Custom." What's stopping me from making progress within my own life? My own customs.

What if I don't like my customs? This song has been recorded before. I just can't wait to get back on the road again. I don't know what my love is yet, but I'm not finding it here, and I just can't wait to get back on the road again.