May 19 – Kingsnake on the trail. Golden eagle. 12 miles in 3 hours to get lunch at a lakeside tavern in a sequestered New Jersey town. 
Stopping every few days in a different place has made me acutely aware of the fact that no two communities are quite the same. Back in Port Clinton there were old men in baseball caps fly fishing on weekends and old cedar walled barber shops. Here in — let me look up the name — Sandyston, there’s a lake but no fisherman and every driveway has got some kind of jumped up truck, most sporting bruised, off-color replacement parts and hydraulic winches mounted to brush guards. PC was a Pennsylvania town stuck to the old ways, full of retired handymen who could fix anything. Sandyston was home to the wreckers, the ones who build homemade ramps to reenact monster truck derbies and are notorious for yelling things like, “hey, check THIS out!”
I like Sandyston though. For the burgers and the lakeside chairs and even more than that for reminding me that people are different everywhere.

There’s something liberating about realizing that people can live by beliefs and values that are all fragmented into different shapes.
We all remember kindergarten, playing with blocks and fitting square pegs into square holes. Well, people aren’t like that. There aren’t hard lines or edges where we begin and end. Instead, we’re like water, we can take any shape. We all see the world differently, that’s part of what it means to be human. If we all had the same logical opinions about everything we’d be machines.
I like red, you like blue: there’s no logic there, only emotion. We like what we like. And when it comes to something as mundane as favorite colors most people are tolerant of opposing opinions.
But in some cases, like when we hear of a Muslim extremist burning a Christian church or vice versa, people fail to tolerate beliefs contrary to their own. The differences in opinion just seem too huge and they wind up at each other’s throats. The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight calls this “aggressive expansion.” I’ll call it what it is: cognitive imperialism. Simply put it’s when two people go to war, each intending to conquer the other’s worldview and replace it with their own.
My philosophy is to try and see the world from all these contrary different points of view, to see the mosaic in which my ideas are only a single fragmented lens. It’s helped me see that there’s no one right way to live life. Everyone finds their own path through the maze.
It also helps me avoid fights. You’re less likely to get hit if you can listen to someone’s angry rant and at the end be able to say, “I understand.”
Passing mile marker 1309 – Nomad