New York

My Modern Day Desert

A few months ago I watched a 17-part YouTube series on Exodus hosted by Jordan Peterson that totally changed the approach I take to reading and understanding the Bible. If you haven’t seen it, I cannot recommend it enough. It is an extremely long, dense and thorough x-ray of the book with perhaps no greater assemblage of mental and spiritual firepower at the helm.

But don’t worry, this is not going to be an exegesis of the book. Rather, I want to talk about one specific and important element of the book of Exodus that I took away from this series, and around which I have begun to plan the next period of my life.

The desert.

In Exodus, the desert is a real place through which the Israelites trekked and wandered after their flight from Egypt toward the promised land. A straight ahead reading of this book sees the Israelites toil and grumble as they deal with the chaotic freedom (re: wilderness) of the desert, at times even fondly reminiscing the oppressive state they fled.

Exodus 14:11-12: "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you [Moses] took us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: 'Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness."

There are many instances such as this in the book where the Israelites lose faith in Moses, long for the life they had in Egypt, presumably forgetting they were slaves under a tyrannical pharaoh, and lose sight of their greater purpose - to arrive at the promised land and fulfill God’s covenant.

Such a direct (literal) reading of Exodus certainly makes for good storytelling, but prevents the reader from relating to the Israelites, and sets the true meaning of the story out of reach. After all, we live in a free society with abundant resources and access to modern medicine. What desert have we to survive, the reader might ask. What wilderness must I bear?

Furthermore, what good is it to struggle in the first place? Why make life harder than it needs to be? In other words, why go through the desert at all?

In the case of the Israelites, the case is made for them - to escape slavery and oppression. They must escape a real oppressor, by traveling through a real desert to arrive at a real promised land.

The desert is not the only symbol. The entire story is a physical representation of the struggle to bring righteous order into one’s life, to wrangle chaos into submission, and ultimately to submit oneself to something greater.

Once this occurred to me - perhaps 25 years too late - I suddenly realized that I have yet to cross my desert. This is not to say I have never struggled or experienced hardship in my life. In fact, to the extent I have strengthened at all as a person and as a man, I can map that strength directly back to strife, struggle and stress.

But still, it is as though my struggles were of my own making, against weaker opponents wearing padded gloves, never truly at risk of losing anything meaningful should I fail.

And so, New York calls…

Last October, after completing an incredible motorcycle trip in California, I flew to New York instead of flying back home to Nashville, and spent a few days enjoying time with friends in the city. I’d been to New York several times, and I’d always had a great time, but never considered it a place to live. Even after having lived in Seoul, South Korea for a year - one of the largest metropolises in the world - New York always felt too big, loud and fast.

Not this time.

Something about the size, pace and chaos of the city presented itself as an opportunity. I hadn’t quite put together what I was thinking, but after months of analysis, and some key conversations with family and friends, it became clear to me that New York would be my desert.

I can hear you already. Wow, Fletcher. New York City? Some desert…

Don’t get me wrong. There are way worse places to live than New York. In many ways it is the opposite of a desert. Food, water and shelter are never more than a stone’s throw away. There are people everywhere. Opportunities for every kind of job, project or artistic endeavor exist. All you have to do is work.

And that’s just it. For me, over the past few years, life was too easy. In 2020, when the world as we know it took a drastic turn, when people lost their jobs, their livelihoods, their purpose and their lives, I was working from home collecting a paycheck, and making more money than I had ever made.

Even when I got laid off in August of 2023, I immediately sold my house (really good timing), and was able to go on adventures, take vacations, and patiently wait for another work opportunity to present itself. Simply put, I was not being challenged.

And the truth is I won’t be unless, god forbid, some horrible unforeseen life event happens that foists me into dire circumstances. Instead, because life is good, I have to disrupt it myself to see what I’m made of. Looking back, the only times I’ve ever learned about myself, the only times I’ve ever grown, are after I’ve been tested, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

So why New York? Why not Kansas or Nebraska or something like that. Why not the actual desert?

Fair questions. The answer comes in two parts.

I chose New York because the last time I was there I felt a pull to it. I don’t know how else to describe it other than that I truly could envision myself living in a place other than Nashville for the first time in my life. Even when I lived in Seoul, it was never because I wanted to go there specifically, nor did I ever want to live there longer than the year I was obligated to in my contract. This felt different.

The second reason has to do with two of the biggest problems in my life: loneliness and familiarity. This is a little harder to untangle, but suffice it to say, Nashville is and always will be my home. My whole family live here, and I have a deep and powerful friend group that I would be leaving behind. At the same time, I’ll be entering my 40th year of life unmarried and without children, which means I spend a great deal of time alone. Being a husband and a father are incredibly important to me, and so the absence of those elements of my life concern me. I expressed this concern to a friend of mine who has been doing a lot self improvement over the past year or so, and he helped me realize that if loneliness is something I’m struggling with, then follow the stoic mantra “the obstacle is the way.” Lean into the loneliness.

In other words, let go of the familiarity of Nashville, and dive into a great big place where you have no established friend group, no family, no routine. Solve the problem of loneliness by embracing it. Allow New York to represent a drastic departure from my normal way of life, and then tame it.

The Israelites escaped the tyranny of the pharaoh by fleeing Egypt, toiled through the harsh conditions of the desert, and entered the promised land.

My plan is to escape the tyranny of the limitations of my own self conscience, toil through the crucible that is New York, and re-enter Nashville as a better man.