Cheshna

“What if my friends went on without me? What if my absence revealed that I was never really necessary? What if no one notices I'm gone?”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

“Once you know you are worthy and your story is worthy, you fight for other stories.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins

“In so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father’s train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a new life on the other side of the world. There was the disappearance of the name Gogol’s great-grandmother had chosen for him, lost in the mail somewhere between Calcutta and Cambridge. This had led, in turn, to the accident of his being named Gogol, defining and distressing him for so many years. He had tried to correct that randomness, that error. And yet it had not been possible to reinvent himself fully, to break from that mismatched name. His marriage had been something of a misstep as well. And the way his father had slipped away from them, that had been the worst accident of all, as if the preparatory work of death had been done long ago, the night he was nearly killed, and all that was left for him was one day, quietly, to go. And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning.”
― Jedidiah Jenkins, To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret