The end

It’s the final night of my trip and time to reflect.

Against traveling again

Traveling is one of those things we know is inherently pointless and wasteful, but something very few of us, I think, would ever want to give up. The past ten months of my life were a wash! I spent tens of thousands of dollars and learned nothing: I didn’t figure out how I wanted to spend my life. The sagacious tidbits with which I’ve concluded so many chapters of this journey’s record are not likely to redirect my life in any significant way. I’m quite certain I’m doomed to live my life just as I spent my travels: bumbling about, having some amazing experiences that were only minimally orchestrated by my own hand, and otherwise a lot of forgettable moments, lying on the beach, or dancing, or picking grapes, or practicing mandolin, or studying the local language or eating some amazing food. In fact, aside from the last part, I don’t think any of the things I’ve done on this trip are different from what I do in the US.

BUT THE WATER SPORTS

Right, right, right, I have never scuba dived in the US or (successfully) surfed in the US. I’ve never prayed, worshipped or meditated at any religious edifice in the US, or watched the sunrise over the ocean in the US. I’ve never been to a flower festival or recorded a song in the US, nor have I ever celebrated Chinese new year or driven a motorbike in the US.

But I could have.

And maybe that’s the most valuable thing about travel: it forces us outside of our comfort zone. That’s not to say I’d have never gone scuba diving without leaving the US, I just don’t think I’d ever have considered it without some of the motivating experiences I had in Japan, and the access to instruction and amazing sites I had in Thailand and the Philippines. My comfort zone doesn’t involve going to aquariums because I find them generally overpriced, dull, sometimes depressing, and the bending of the light through the glass gives me headaches. But bored in Southern Japan and finding myself at such a place to kill some time is the kind of push out of my comfort zone (perhaps more accurately an attempt to reclaim my comfort zone: from stalking the street to sitting in a cold sphere looking out a window) that is necessary to ask the question: should I get my open water certificate?

So all of these things we could do, all of our potentials as actors and agents, have a much higher chance of being trotted in front of our face for our consideration than when we sit at home and watch our stories, going out with the same friends for dinner and drinks every month, seeing the same coworkers to collaborate on the same problems. Traveling doesn’t make you a better person. It doesn’t make you explore who you are and what you love and what you want to do and what kind of life you want to lead. It takes away the life you have been leading, such that any passing fancy can lead you by the nose into a new corner of yourself you’d have never known existed before.

The hard truths

It does come with risks. Maybe it means never returning home. Maybe it means returning home only long enough to gather funds or other resources to leave again. Maybe it means terminating relationships that no longer connect. Abandoning a lucrative career that doesn’t work. Growth isn’t guaranteed. Nor even is change. But the possibility of coming to life-altering conclusions is much higher when your life is disrupted, by your own hand or otherwise, than when your life is left tidy and unbothered as it currently stands. A trip around the world makes it hard not to consider the big questions. What is a fulfilling job, what is a loving relationship, what is a good place to live, what do any of these adjectives even mean?

The curiosity is useful, the fear useless

— The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov

I’ve faced some of these truths. What would devastate the me of ten months ago is that I think what I’ve come to realize is I can’t live outside the US. I perhaps could have, years ago, but I’m at a point in my life where my personal connections are too dear to me, and the distance too much in a different country, to make the change to my life without a big and probably painful reason.

I think I’ve also decided my career doesn’t matter. I’d like to help people, and I’d like to do something about climate change, but ultimately what serves me best is putting a roof over my head and being able to take care of the loved ones for whom I plan to root in the US. The me of 2023 was really hoping this time away would produce some revelations about what I could do with my remaining time on this earth, but it really hasn’t. Nothing I didn’t know before has come to light. Really all I have before me is to choose, day after day, as yet with no less or more passion for my options than before.

The island where they live to 100

I left little time, little money, for Greece at the end of my travels. I took the boat from Fethiye to Rhodes and then basically slept for three days. I was absolutely devastatingly tired. I couldn’t pull myself out of bed. When I did, for food, I found myself in a haze, my head heavy, like I was being forced into the ground from the top of my head by Zeus’s immortal finger. My first evening in Rhodes I did get the chance to walk around and I thought it was a cute place, and the wine dark water was so exciting to me, its color so unique in my experience, so inviting. Still I never made it into the waters of Rhodes, and aside from a short evening’s foray in the old town for some food and some gelato, I barely left the hostel. Now perhaps my writing of the last article makes a touch more sense: one’s health is a big fucking deal.

The next stop was Crete. This is one of the islands where people very regularly live to be centenarians. I thought about linking an article but I’ll let you do your own research if it so behooves you. One article did blame it on the olive oil, however, and as a life long despiser of olive oil’s flavor, I found in Crete it tasted delicious. We spent about ten days on the island, swing dancing for four days and beach bumming four others, and probably in transit for the remainder. The whole western half of Crete — and no doubt the eastern, but I never made it over there — reminds me of northern New Mexico if it was covered in olive trees and cooled by a sea breeze. I have little interest in living in Europe, but I could almost see myself researching how to move to Crete. The food is excellent, the beaches are wonderful, I did no trekking but I know the hiking’s good, and the people are, save for a few surly bus operators, wonderfully pleasant.

Greece is kind of a weird place, especially Athens, because the cities are perfectly familiar to anyone who has lived in the west, but they are interrupted by ruins thousands of years old. It’s only a five minute walk from where you bought your new phone or a ticket to get on an aeroplane that will propel you at over 300 miles an hour 40,000 feet in the air, to a garden surrounding the ruins of the Lyceum where Aristotle taught in 335 BC. I don’t know if that’s the correct year but it’s what the AI suggested, and I know the century is correct so I’ll leave it be, unverified. Asia’s juxtaposition of the new with the old had left me breathless, but I feel like this history is something more meaningful to me having been taught about it all my life, heard references to it in so many of my readings. It always felt like something almost hypothetical, something that had to be practically accepted on faith, and then it’s standing right there in front of me, while I stuff a gyro down my throat.

It can be a bit humbling and frightening, knowing that, while we will probably be forgotten in just a few decades time, if we’re being truly honest with our ego, it’s possible that the things we do could last millennia. What do we do with our time with that in mind?

That terrifying kind of freedom

Traveling around the world gives you a sense of freedom that can be scary. It’s more daunting, I think, because there are so many options. I visited ten countries outside my home, outside of the nearly two hundred options I had before me. Perhaps closer to one hundred after visa restrictions are considered. I saw so little of even the smallest nations I visited. The world is so huge. But the freedom I describe above, that freedom every day to choose a life, to live out the consequences of those choices, though no different from choosing every day whether to go for a hike or cross the border or take some other course of action, seems so much more paralyzingly massive in scope. Perhaps it’s because when traveling it feels like scribbling on post it notes, whereas determining a career feels like carving in stone. This is lasting.

But so is this. The people I’ve met will stay in my heart forever. Years from now I will dream about them, out of the blue. When I look at the tattoo on my forearm, the scar on my left foot, I will be reminded of the good times we had together, the inside jokes we made. It would only minimize me to think that I didn’t have some sort of similar effect on these people, that they will not occasionally recall my voice, my face. Is it because in general one would never inscribe this on a resume in an attempt to prove they’re a worthy hire? That I have no intention of building an identity on the backs of my friends, contrary to how I use my colleagues?

Is it possible that, despite my best efforts over the past decade, I’m living to work instead of working to live? Perhaps because of that terrible sense of freedom, that gaping maw of possibility that opens up before me every time I consider the fact that none of these jobs need be permanent, need define my person or value? There are so many people on this earth that to consider any given relationship in one’s life, be it romantic or professional, as irreplaceable or even optimal is to make incredibly strong assertions about one’s fortune. Sometimes that kind of faith is necessary, but faith is, like most things in life, a matter of choice. We choose to accept this person as “the one,” this job as our “career,” and this city as “our home.”

Until we can’t.

Conclusions are for dead people

Recently I was reading a book I quite disliked. It did, however, remind me: life is for questions. Life is for exploration. When we stop thinking, when we stop asking, we commit intellectual suicide. I think this was the point of the first hundred pages of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and I know for a fact it is the point of Socrates' beseeching about the good life. This trip did not provide me the answers. In fact, it only gave me more questions. But perhaps that’s a good thing. Before, I was so certain everything in my life was wrong, I don’t think I enjoyed a second of it because I looked at every aspect of my life as transitory, just a step on the way to something better, rather than part of the whole. Indubitably, future mes will disagree with each other on whether those moments, those months, were a waste, or deeply significant, or possibly even my crowning achievement.

“Some people lose God when they find themselves; some people lose God when they lose themselves”

— The Discomfort of Evening, Marieke Luca Rijneveld

It’s just so tempting to narrativize one’s own life. The problem is that a life is not a story, except when it is reduced to an anti-Kantian means. Life, rather, must always be the ends to which we apply our means. We apply such means (our skills, our energy, our resources, etc) over the course of many narratives (a term of employment, a journey, an affair), not one overarching plot. After all, what kind of boring story spends so much set up on learning to stand, learning to hold in your poop until you reach a toilet, and then so much of the denouement forgetting these skills? My journey this year has been a story. In fact, were I to revise it, it even has a strong arc and climax, dark night of the soul, character growth, and I could mold an excellent tale out of it. But it’s not the story I predicted, not the story I had hoped to live, let alone tell, when I started pushing paragraphs describing how nice the clouds look in Wyoming.

But that’s why this seems so anticlimactic. It’s a blog, not a tale. It’s a record of my clumsy time traveling, not a story of how I got better. Getting better is still to come, and I probably won’t be sharing a lot of that here. But the reason I read so often is because I find others words often give me direction on how I can live the life I desire. That’s why I’ve decided to share so much here despite my typical preference for privacy. Maybe you will find in my words some inspiration for your own journey, internal or global. I wouldn’t know what else to do with my words.