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August 10, 2004
Time and distance.
This trip has been physically trying, but mentally, I love every minute of it. My thoughts continually stray from good thoughts and memories to bad realities and implications. I am worried this trip will leave me unable to maintain a job that doesn't allow for a significant amount of vacation time per year. I love to explore, but you can't explore in a weekend. Just being in Glacier National Park for 6 hours made me want to come back for weeks on end and really get to know the place. At the moment, I have little in the way of future plans. Yet I find myself still dwelling on the necessity to have plans. How can I make plans? I am beginning to let go and figure what happens, happens. The only reason to make plans at this point would be to try and create a false sense of security for myself. False, because I really don't know where I'll end up or what I SHOULD be doing. I emphasize SHOULD because I could make safe plans based on options which are most likely, but that would be the only reason I would choose those options, because they are easy and safe. I am not sure what's the point of easy and safe in the void of some larger goal or purpose.
Now, I just hope I get to Europe and hope, once there, I can stay long enough to enjoy it. I feel the critical stares of those who would label my travels as an unwarranted vacation. I don't know how to justify this, but I don't see it as a vacation. To me, its no more a vacation than going to school. Part of this is our cultures broken notions on the importance of travel. I've talked about this before, but one week of vacation isn't enough to have a diverse life. Most other industrialized countries know this. In a world where the only work time is real time, traveling is excess. But work for the sake of work gives security at the expense of diversity and possibly happiness. I am realizing that uncertainty needs to be embraced and not feared at every turn.
Many people have asked whether I am running away. My answer is to ask them what I might be running away from. I don't know where I'm going, but I don't feel like I have a place to call home either. It is a strange feeling to not have a place. We traditionally think of traveling is getting away from ones place. Without a place traveling becomes less defined. Its more like moving ones place, continuously, at a rapid pace. Even the notion of needing to quickly 'end up' somewhere seems like a cultural construction. Maybe I'll keep moving for a while. Though, I have to admit, I do not feel free from place or past. I wish I understood what happened. Then again, if I understood it might not have happened. I see these questions written on the miles of asphalt passing under me. I've mostly given up trying to find answers to these questions I've dissected over any over looking for something I may have missed, yet I can't seem to stop dwelling on the questions themselves. After 2500 miles I do not seem any further from them. Time and distance are not the same.
Posted by wonko at August 10, 2004 09:21 AM
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Comments
I would imagine that the answer is to find a work that you don't consider a compromise. Work that doesn't make traveling seen like an escape. A work that fills your interest and imagination. When your vacations are used for diversity, not escape. It is also true that lack of sleep, does not make for sound judgment.
Posted by: simonsays at August 10, 2004 10:24 AM
There was an interesting line in an interview on NPR this morning on the subject of vacation. It pointed out that Americans tend to "fetishize" vacation -- we obsess over it, always ask each other about it, etc. But the French don't do this at all -- it's not a common topic of discussion. The interviewer postulated that the reason for this disparity is that most of us get two, maybe three weeks of vacation -- it is so scarce we are expected to make the most of it. In contrast, the French are guaranteed five weeks minimum for vacation per year. So consider, would Americans be so obsessed with the idea of vacation if ~10% of their year was devoted to it, like so many other industrialized countries?
Posted by: gefilte at August 10, 2004 12:01 PM
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