I am now home. I have now had the opportunity to sleep in my own bed and hug my wife. This trip was different for me. I have been privileged to be able to travel abroad for over a month at a stretch probably nine times or so. The fact that I can’t say if it was eight or ten with certainty makes the point of privilege.
I just feel different this time. I feel different than I remember feeling after returning from previous trips. The scientist in me is curious. Was this really different and if so why and how?
I have never felt the level of gratitude before that I felt this time. Of course the world has changed, as has technology as well as me. One thing that hasn’t changed is my big green backpack. I still use it after more than thirty years. But more on that another time as I plan to write an entire blog post on that glorious bag that I have lived out of for more than a year of my life easily.
Let’s start with what is different. Obviously I’m older, hence the titles of this series of posts. But, I am only one year older than my last magical trip through Spain and Portugal. So that seems largely unimportant. For this trip I essentially only went to places that I know pretty well or at least have been to before. Rome, I bet this was at least my dozenth time to be privileged to spend time with you (there is that word again). I even got to celebrate my best friend’s birthday there with him and his son there. That was so special. Bologna was the only new city for me with Leipzig and Dublin being visited for only a second time. Maybe some of it was that. I feel like I really know Rome and Vienna and Prague and of course Ingolstadt where we lived for a few years early in our marriage. Ah…marriage……
This was the first time since being 23 that I traveled the whole time by myself, Jackie is nearly always there with me for at least some of it if not most or all. But, I got to stay with our dear friends Moni and Walter as well as spending bonus days with new friends that I made along the way. I got to see old colleagues in Ingolstadt. I am now an unabashed hugger so I had regular hugs from people I met including hosts, so this trip was somewhere in between alone and with friends, so that doesn’t seem too relevant.
I have done lots of meditation on Love over the last several decades so the joyous work put into that practice looks appealing as causally related, but that was essentially the case last year as well?
I did listen to myself better and work on feeling that I could do things that I want to do rather than I feel I somehow should do. Some days I just lounged around. I even cut my trip short by two weeks, changing my return ticket to make it an eight week trip rather than a ten week trip. It was already the longest time I had ever gone without seeing my wife since meeting her (which was tough). I have no idea how military families can do that. I simply don’t think I could. Thank you military families for your sacrifice.
I feel a sense of urgency. I saw so much beautiful art and architecture. I took so many thousands of pictures. I used to paint from my travel photographs. I want to start again. I have strangely felt paralyzed in this for years. With my newly built extensive catalog of great photos and the very public declaration here that I intend to get back into art hopefully you can help hold me accountable. I’m terrified and thrilled with the future, AI and all the rest of it notwithstanding. I am thrilled and terrified to be planning to get back into art and to start a new non-profit, more on that much later as I get that fleshed out a bit.
Turning fear into courage, recasting anxiety as excitement. Maybe that is it. Maybe I am finally learning how to do that a little bit. Maybe. I hope so. I hear my wife wake up, time for a hug now 🙂
