2015 Year in Review

It was an unintended tradition set in place 2 years ago when I wrote my first year-end review. And in the first 2 editions of this post, my report was that I had had fantastic years, filled with more happiness than I could remember for many years.

Welcome to the end of 2015. This year I’m slightly less ebullient, though still generally very satisfied.

The main difference seems to be that, while I did some great things this year, I also experienced a bit more aimlessness than usual. It stands to reason, given that for most of the year I have felt like I am at an inflection point in my vagabonding lifestyle. With my six-year anniversary fast approaching, I just haven’t been enjoying the wandering, traveling, exploring, and seeing new places as much as I used to. I’ve still been doing it, but less fully than before, and with noticeably less gusto.

The problem with this is clear: just going through the motions in a self-chosen vagabonding life doesn’t make a lot of sense.

If I’m not enjoying the rootlessness, what’s the point of incurring the costs of keeping myself out of “the real world?” Costs like sacrificing a high income, or membership at a top notch gym, or being near a large group of readily available friends to spend time with?

There’s a big part of me that is afraid to say this, but for quite a few months now I have had the feeling that I would like my life to be more settled.

It’s a scary place to be.

It’s Déjà vu All Over Again – With a Twist

I have been here before on quite a few occasions, but usually only for short periods. After a few days – or at most a few weeks – of doubt, the weariness passes and I’m once again passionate about vagabonding and continuing to travel.

My standard mantra when I reach these states of uncertainty is “Don’t do anything drastic. Just wait and see if you still feel the same way tomorrow.” And after only a few tomorrows have elapsed, the result has always been that the feeling is gone and I’m glad I didn’t impulsively pack up and run home. (Let’s completely ignore the point that “home” is a very much undefined term for me.)

For the past 6-12 months, the mantra hasn’t worked as well. Too many tomorrows have dawned without me feeling different.

I would love to have the vagabonding fire reignited, and soon. There are so many places that remain on my “to do list.” For example, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the vast continent of Africa. And I haven’t been to South and Central America in over 4 years, despite the fact that I love speaking Spanish and do it with reasonable skill. Eastern Europe is but a fleeting memory for me, having been only to the Czech Republic and Hungary (17 years ago) and Romania in 2013.

I’ve been harboring this hope for re-ignition for quite some time, but thus far the spark hasn’t taken hold. Hence I find myself grappling with questions like,

“What do I want the rest of my life to be all about?”

Of course, that’s overly dramatic. I should really be thinking about the next sub-phase of my life.

Change is always happening, and it’s usually welcomed with open arms in my world. Hence there’s no reason to assume that I have to make choices for the next 40 years. How about just coming up with some plans for the next 40 weeks?

Maybe I could start with 40 days.

Even that has been a challenge for me. It’s pretty obvious God was pretty smart when he chose Noah for the Ark instead of me.

What’s Driving This?

This is a question I ask myself frequently, and the answer I seem to be gravitating toward is that there are some understandable reasons why I feel a sense of wanting to settle down. But my definition of the term “settle down” may not look like most other people’s.

I don’t mean I want to move somewhere, buy a house, and get busy doing the same basic things day in and day out for the rest of my life. While that’s probably closer to what normal people think of when they hear “settle down,” it’s not going to work for me.

All I mean is to be in one place long enough to actually engage in certain activities that do not lend themselves well to a constantly shifting geographic location. For example, the sad reality is that since my last Ironman in 2012, I have not seriously been on a bike.

Riding for hours up steep hills while suffering alongside my buddies is one of my great passions in life. But because it’s hard to ride when you’re constantly moving from place to place – mainly because you can’t readily take a bike with you – the vagabonding lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to the sport.

NOTE: The obvious refutation to this statement is that I could travel the world ON a bike, and this is something I have considered. Given the logistical challenges, I haven’t made the leap yet, but that’s not to say it might not be in the cards at some point.

Also, as much as I love yoga and have done an enormous amount of it over the past 3 years, I am really more of an athlete than a yogi, and in addition to cycling, I also miss the other workouts I’ve done all my life in the gyms I’ve belonged to. Today, thanks to yoga I’m more flexible than I’ve ever been, but I’ve lost some strength and cardiovascular fitness, and I’d like to recapture it.

I could certainly do more bodyweight workouts wherever I happen to be, but all the good ones seem to inflict significant punishment on the knees, and they’re a body part that has been my nemesis for 3 years now. I have been suffering from as-yet unresolved knee pain that has made running nearly impossible, or at least inadvisable, since a few months after the 2012 Ironman. Hence knee-jolting workouts in my room are a problem for me too.

Despite these sentiments, I still love yoga…..

Handstand with a nearly symmetrically placed Goan sun

Please understand, what I’m complaining about here is stuff no one has any right ever to complain about. My life is blessed, and I am clearly aware of and grateful for it every single day. Still, I think it’s the responsibility of all of us to strive for constant improvement in all aspects of life, and the topics I’ve mentioned are areas I want to improve.

And as much as I studiously avoid the topic of relationships in this blog, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that being at least somewhat settled might go a long way toward enabling me to have some kind of reasonable relationship – which is a concept I can honestly say I’m not totally against at this point in my life.

Due to the nature of my personality, and perhaps any number of other pathologies I won’t even attempt to speculate on here, serious romantic relationships have never been a high priority for me. Vagabonding plays into this mindset perfectly. I’m almost never in one place for very long, I always have the sense that I’m on my way out the door from wherever I am, and other people get the same feeling from me. How can you have a relationship in that situation?

While I don’t mind saying that the ladies generally find me attractive enough, most do not like the idea of guys who are not going to be around. Couple this with the fact that the ones I meet soon learn that I’m homeless – albeit by choice – and it’s just possible that my attractiveness drops a few notches in the eyes of humans who exhibit the typical feminine nesting instinct.

i.e., I don’t look like good “husband material.”

Not that I have ever wanted to look like it, given my aversion to anything “normal” – like having the government forcibly turn romantic relationships into draconian financial contracts (i.e., marriage.)

Granted, in the circles I travel, I do run into plenty of girls who are also inveterate travelers and don’t have “normal” lives or jobs, which at least tends to make my unpopular lifestyle choices slightly less objectionable. The challenge is, if you meet someone while you’re both traveling, how do you actually pursue a relationship beyond the initial meeting stage?

This brings up both practical and philosophical issues I don’t intend to delve into here, but let’s just say that the combination of my psychological makeup and my lifestyle hasn’t lent itself to much in the way of real relationships.

What Direction Does This All Point?

In order to potentially address all the concerns I’ve highlighted above, I sense that, heaven forbid, it might make sense for me to stay in one place. At least for a few months.

I’ve done this a bit the past few summers, staying at my parents’ house and playing a lot of golf (another passion of mine that doesn’t fare very well in the vagabonding lifestyle), and it has generally been a success – at least for golf and time with family and old friends.

When it comes to relationships, let’s just say that in my small hometown the number of eligible females who are in the general ballpark of what I’m looking for is approximately zero. Hey, you can’t have everything….which is generally why I like vagabonding, because when I’m somewhere that has a dearth of something I value, I can always choose to leave and go somewhere that’s full of whatever I’m currently missing.

I recently had a two-way psychological help session with my buddy Tim, who is also suffering from a near identical lack of enthusiasm for the constant motion of his own vagabonding lifestyle. After hearing my various gripes, many of which he’s heard before, his primary conclusion was that it sounds like what I need more than anything else is to get myself to a decent location, get a bike, and start riding it. At least for a few months.

This psychoanalysis really caught my attention, because for as long as I can recall I’ve had the sense that if there is one major thing that seems missing from my life, cycling is it. It was as if he had mirrored my constant thoughts back to me, and I had to agree with him.

The options for such a location around the world are many, and I’m starting to think hard about it now. Many of the locations that make the most sense are not year-round warm spots, so I’m really thinking about where I might find myself come spring in the northern hemisphere.

But even with this said, I caution you that my thoughts and plans could change at any moment, based on any number of as-yet unseen factors. Among these potential factors is the fact that I’ve been doing more consulting work of late, meaning that an opportunity(s) could come up that would keep me fairly busy, and even geography-limited, for some period of time. However, the cycling concept is the primary object on my medium-range radar, so let’s see if it comes to pass.

What Has This Year Looked Like?

Despite my assessment that 2015 was rather weak from a vagabonding standpoint, I did continue to cover some ground.

I rang in the New Year in Bali for the 3^rd year in a row. Mere days later I was whisked off to Boston for two dark and frigid weeks on some business. From there I embarked on my first Saudi Arabian adventure, for a very long 1-month stint doing some work in the very segregated desert capital of Riyadh.

Hanging out with the Singles crowd.

Relief from the desert came in the form of a return to Bali and Ubud, where I spent a few very enjoyable weeks decompressing on a yoga mat before heading off to the beaches of Goa to continue my love-hate relationship with the Indian subcontinent – and all the insanity it entails.

In front of Mama’s kitchen, with the hot sun in our faces and the Indian spices in our nostrils

Triangle pose under the sunset

I followed that up with a couple of weeks in the relative normalcy of my favorite Malaysian food paradise of Melaka, which quickly rolled into a whirlwind day of tourism in Dubai, home of the world’s only 7-star hotel, and then some chilly time in the not-quite-spring weather of the always beautiful Scandinavian splendor of Norway.

This is as close as you’re going to get. Unless you’re prepared to drop a few hundred bucks just to be able to set foot inside the front door. As you can see, I wasn’t exactly dressed for it either.

Come May, I found myself returning to the States for the second time of the year. My time on home soil included lots of golf while staying with my family, endless head-shaking at the garbage that’s on US television these days, a couple of weeks of work in Denver, a week in the scorching Arizona desert, and a week visiting friends in LA.

It’s a desert – it’s supposed to be hot and dry, right?

By late August it was off to a month of work in London, followed by a gray and rainy week in Amsterdam, which mercifully gave way to a warm and sunny visit to my ancestral homelands of Greece and Turkey.

Not in the tropics, as you might assume, but in London’s Hyde Park.

The island of Chios, Greece. It almost looks more like Tuscany than Tuscany does.

Here I am at ANZAC Cove, site of fierce battles and a major memorial to the Aussie and Kiwi troops in the WWI Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.

I then shifted from Europe back to Asia, with a couple of weeks in Thailand, and a few days in smoke-filled Singapore (thanks unfortunately to the raging fires destroying the forests of Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra.)

Being entertained by some incredible Thai kids on the beach in Koh Samui. In case you’re wondering, two of them are indeed twins, and were extremely cute when they tried every yoga move they saw me doing.

My return to Ubud was soon accompanied by the heavy mist of volcanic ash from the eruption of the nearby volcano Mt. Rinjani, which shut down the airport and kept a lot of people stranded here for a couple of weeks longer than their vacation plans had originally accounted for.

Mt. Rinjani erupting

I’m getting a bit tired just writing about all this, but it doesn’t end there, because after a month in Ubud, and a re-opening of the airport, I was off again for 2 weeks in Saudi Arabia, allowing me to experience a “traditional” Saudi Thanksgiving. Thankfully, I didn’t have a Saudi Christmas as well, and instead I returned here to the tropics of Ubud and have had a very nice month of December back in the company of some good friends, warm weather, and a Christmas dinner by the swimming pool.

My New Year’s plans are currently nonexistent, and likely to stay that way. Nothing dramatic like 5 years ago when I rang in the New Year all dressed in white in a huge party on the beach in Rio, or even 3 years ago when I brought in 2013 by hiking to the top of the Balinese volcano of Mt. Batur to see the year’s first sunrise from above.

A Sea Of Humanity – Next To The Sea

First Light of 2013 – At the Summit of Mount Batur

 

It’s a Wonderful Life…..

……and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Like all people I have my ups and downs. And constant vagabonding isn’t always glamorous. But I consider myself among the most fortunate people I’ve ever met. I could always have more of something, and it’s easy to complain about pretty much anything if you’re bound and determined to. But when I consider the good fortune I’ve had to be able to pursue the life I have, especially when compared to so many of the tragic things that are going on in this world that I use as my playground, there’s nothing I can do but give thanks. And that’s what I do, every day, for everything and everyone I have in my life.

And I thank you for continuing to read this blog. I haven’t been writing as frequently as I’d like this year – much of which has been due to the minor loss of enthusiasm I’ve told you about above – but I continue to write for myself and for those of you who loyally tune in to support what I’m doing.

So thanks again, and wish me luck in plotting my next steps. I’m confident something great will come from my current angst. After all, isn’t angst what has typically led to the world’s greatest breakthroughs?