There’s a guy who lives around the corner from me who intrigues me.

Most days, as I pass his house on my way home from work, I see him sitting in his front yard. If I waive to him, he raises his walking staff in acknowledgement. When I don’t waive, I feel his gaze follow me as I make my turn at his house.

His hairy chest peeks out from behind his make-shift leather vest. The feathers and trinkets on his staff shake in the wind. His leather fur trapper style hat tames the wild, long, gray hair upon his head. His hairy, bare legs stand ready to raise his body to attention at a moment’s notice. He perches upon his lawn chair, giving the impression of what a lounging Moses would be like if he’d been born in the modern age as a mountain man.

I can’t help but wonder, just what part of this world makes him the happiest? How is it that this man can dress, by most people’s standards, in the most ridiculous way, with complete bliss in his eyes? What makes this man happy, at peace, with the world around him?

I drive by him, worn out from a day at work, ready to curl up into a ball and avoid the world for a while, wondering what secret has he learned that I cannot. In my dress clothes and tie, I feel myself contained, bound in some perverse form of indentured servitude. I would feel naked in his clothes, wholly unprepared for his world, even completely unable to understand it.

Is he a fool for dressing that way, living within his own form of freedom? Or am I the fool with the tie around his neck like a noose, driving back and forth from work without purpose, wasting my precious time here on earth.

What does he know that I cannot learn?