In August 2015, I attended a five-day retreat on a sprawling Colorado ranch. On day four, participants were invited to spend 10 hours by themselves in nature. We were to devise a ritual based on a line from a David Whyte poem: “Out of the silence/you can make a promise/it will kill you to break.”

I don’t remember the precise words of my promise. It had to do with being true to my deepest self. The supporting ritual had to do with lying under a partially fallen tree and kicking out a branch. I did the ritual, explained it in a debrief session later and flew home the next day. Within a few months I had forgotten the promise.

In April of this year, nearly nine years later, I attended another retreat in Colorado. This one was at a hotel in Broomfield and involved a marriage ceremony. I woke up on Sunday feeling firmly rooted and with absolute clarity about what being true to myself demanded. I’ve never felt that aligned before, and the feeling has persisted.

Yesterday, after a month of prep work, I put my house in St. Paul on the market. Today I got an offer above asking price. My real estate agent tells me another offer will come tomorrow. On Saturday, I’ll drive to an outer-ring suburb to test-drive a Ford Transit camper van. My intuition tells me this is the van I’ll wind up buying.

I have achieved escape velocity.

Next month I’ll quit my job, get another tattoo and head out on the road. My golden retriever and I will live the #vanlife for who knows how long. I plan to visit churches and cemeteries and national parks. I plan to read and write and volunteer at men’s retreats and attend a training or two. I’ll visit friends in Arizona and Colorado and Washington. I’ll visit Nebraska in March for the annual migration of the sand hill cranes. I’ll visit Lexington, Kentucky, where the monk Thomas Merton famously saw everyone around him shining like the sun.

The idea for this adventure — what I call my walkabout — came to me after I was laid off in December 2015. In the nine years since, I’ve found myriad reasons not to step into the unknown. I don’t have enough money. Where will I live afterward? What if I get lonely? Maybe I should be more practical. Definitely I should be more practical. After all, I’m a hard-working North Dakota farm boy, not a hippie.

Lying in that Broomfield hotel bed in April, I realized I actually am a hippie, whatever that is, and I’d just been waiting for my real life to begin. I’d been waiting for the stars to align perfectly before I could live the life I was meant to live. Everything had to be “Just So” beforehand. There could either be zero risks or just a few of the kind of risks that are soft and surmountable. Cute risks.

Two months from now, after I trade the equity in my house for a decked out camper van, I plan to attend another retreat in Colorado, the Conscious Sexuality retreat. This time I’ll drive and will make the trip feeling like I’m living as my whole self, that I’m living once more from inside a promise that will kill me to break.

To sum up: 10 months after getting divorced, I am selling my house, quitting my job and putting most of my belongings in storage. I am a hippie with short hair, setting out on an adventure. As a wise person once told me: Sometimes you just have to say fuck it.