Le jeux sont faits

Back in highschool, I read a book by Jean-Paul Sartre in French class. The title roughly translates into "The game is up" or "The chips are down". The story goes something like this:

A worker, Pierre, goes to the house of a rich woman, Eve, and does some repairs. They don't speak or know each other. Not long thereafter, Pierre dies from an unrelated accident and the Eve is poisoned by her unfaithful husband. They meet in the afterlife - where the dead have no form and can see the living but are invisible to them. The afterlife is run like a huge bureaucracy.

Pierre and Eve meet in the afterlife and become soulmates. But they cannot consummate their love because they are dead. They appeal to the head bureaucrat of the afterlife - who gives them a deal: we'll send you back to your former lives in the world of the living - if in 24 hours, you can find each other and establish a love, you are free to remain and live out your lives.

The couple is sent back to the world of the living. Inevitably, they fail to find each other, caught up in the web of their former lives. They return to the world of the dead, condemned to remain there forever.

When I was in highschool, I saw the logic of the story in the rigidity and barriers of the social structure, where cliques and social classes often kept people who, in any other circumstance, were potential soulmates. The geek and the cheerleader perhaps would have been soulmates - but they'd never know.

I've been thinking about this story lately as it pertains to travel. A few times in our lives, with some planning and courage, we manage to break free of the grind and do something that recaptures what it means to be alive.

Its a scary, unimaginable thing to just pack up and go for many - but what awaits them is life, pulsing in all its freedom and existential splendor. The people they encounter are those who they would never meet in their former lives - where they are constrained at home by habit, tradition, socio-economic, and perhaps cultural factors.

No matter what situation you have in your life, you always have a choice to be happy and to fully embrace freedom. How we choose to spend our life here is completely up to us.