2019 Year in Review

2019 is coming to a close, and I’m in Bolivia on my big South American bike trip. We have had some killer rides of late, with long days and great scenery, and my legs are as strong as they’ve been in ages. I want to take the time to give a brief recap and review of what 2019 has been about for me. I’ll attempt to break with my usual tradition of being long-winded and make it brief, but I have a hunch I won’t succeed. Please bear with me while I try.

I would like to say that 2019 has been a transition year for me, as I am hoping to transition into a more stable lifestyle that involves less constant motion and vagabond-style homelessness. I would like to say that, but it’s a bit premature at this point, because of course I’ve been hoping to make just such a transition for the past 3 years and haven’t succeeded yet, so I remain skeptical of myself. However, 2019 had enough periods where I felt truly dissatisfied with this lifestyle that I can at least assign a higher probability to the idea of a change actually happening in 2020.

The dissatisfaction is positively combined with what I can best describe as a return of my competitive drive to get out and make things happen in my life, using more of my talents more often. And while in the modern world of digital nomad lifestyles it’s not completely necessary to be settled down in order to act on this drive, it certainly can make it easier. I don’t know what form my renewed drive will take or in what direction it will lead me, but I have a few things brewing in my head that I hope I can turn into reality.

It makes sense to address the dissatisfaction, because it may not be clear what I mean or where it stems from. The nature of my rootless vagabonding life has changed over time since I started in February 2010. In the first few years I didn’t feel as lonely when I was in phases where I was alone – which has represented a considerable majority of these nearly 10 years. I have written a few times about the difference between being alone and being lonely, as well as the solitary life of a vagabond, notably here and here. There is no doubt it is an important issue for someone with my lifestyle.

More than many people, I need my alone time. I think that’s a reflection of my “intellectual nature.” While my academic research career ended many years ago, I still retain some of the characteristics and training that went into it, so the fact is that even if I’m not accomplishing anything in a formal sense (I’m usually not), I still like to have a lot of active areas of “research” or some kind of serious intellectual endeavor going on in my mind. And that requires having the time and space to let the mind work, which is generally a more solitary activity.

However, one of the major reasons I quit theoretical physics research was that I’m not a fundamentally solitary person. I’m a true “people person.” I not only enjoy and thrive on having many close relationships that I tend to regularly, but I NEED these relationships. I can survive without them for a while, as I can also survive for very extended periods without food and water (courtesy of my wrestling training.) But just as I eventually need nourishment or my body will collapse physically, I eventually have to get out of solitary mode and get close to people again, or something inside me will collapse emotionally.

I have felt this happen a number of times over the past 10 years, and I felt it even more strongly in 2019 than I recall previously. It’s probably the result of an accumulated deficit of close contact with people who are meaningful to me. Obviously I did have contact with close friends and family this year, as well as in previous years. And if you’re one of them, you’re probably thinking “But I spent quite a bit of time with you this year. Don’t I count, you schmuck??” Yes, I can assure you that you count – more than you probably even realize, given my predicament. But while brief spurts are great and can be incredibly helpful, they aren’t the same as regular, day to day contact with people who matter to you. And for most of you who matter to me, we didn’t quite reach the threshold of “regular” or “day to day.”

NOTE: I must say that I was able to spend enough time with my parents that I did reach this threshold with them, as I have in most of the past 10 years, and that’s something I’m very happy about. For someone my age, and of their ages, I have spent far more time with them during my vagabonding life than would be average. This is in spite of me being on the other side of the world so much of the year. Ironically, the amount of time we have spent together has been much, much greater than it was for the many years when I lived in LA and they lived in Massachusetts (as they still do.) It has been a wonderful opportunity, and I’m glad they don’t mind having me effectively move into their house for these periods. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Speaking of the years I lived at the beach in LA, during this period I had regular, day to day contact with people in the form of my many close friends at my gym, where we were all regulars every morning at 5 am. The constancy of this contact, made possible by living a non-transient lifestyle in one place with other people who were doing the same, added a richness to my life that is different from the benefits gained by travel and its constant offering of new places, people, and experiences. It’s not that one is better than the other, but they are definitely different.

Most people seem to live lives consisting of almost 100% regularity and very little travel-style variety. I know that’s not right for me, as I need a lot of the change and excitement that travel brings. But I still have to have some type of reasonable balance between the two, and in 2019 I clearly felt out of balance, weighted far too much in the direction of the “new,” at a time when I wasn’t necessarily craving much of it.

I hate to sound jaded and ungrateful, because I try hard not to be, but I’m kind of tired of having so much fun all the time. (That was a joke, in case you didn’t realize.)

A good example of my experience was the month I spent in Lisbon during June and July. Here are a few pictures to remind you.

Lisbon, Portugal cityscape in the Alfama District.

I was in Lisbon long enough to do quite a few things, meet some people, develop routines, get involved in a few groups, and create relationships. I was not much different from many of the  digital nomads and expats who in recent years have made Lisbon a base, and I was interacting with a good number of them. But in the back of my mind I knew I wasn’t going to stay much more than that month, at least at that point in time, and I could feel myself not following through on the relationships in the way you do when you believe you will be able to continue the friendship longer term. Consequently, I found myself spending far too much time alone, isolating myself, when my natural tendency – and I believe one of my great skills – would be to take the next steps and deepen these bonds.

I guess I had become resigned to the idea that it wasn’t worth it. Why put in the effort, only to abandon things just as they’re starting to move to the next level? While this may be rather logical, it certainly does not lead to the kind of life that is going to provide me with true fulfillment at this point in my journey. Again, 8 or 9 years ago was a different story. Even 5 years ago. There was a lot more freshness in the transient travel lifestyle, and the excitement of it more than made up for not having as much close, ongoing contact with people. Now the “newness” of travel is more like a routine for me at this point, which almost by definition devalues the newness aspect.

Another important factor is that earlier on in this whole lifestyle experiment, the bonds with my large crew of LA friends were still warm and strong. I communicated with them more often, and while I was of course not seeing them on a day to day basis (or at all), there was a lot of security in knowing that they were still there and really were still a part of my life. But as the old saying goes: out of sight, out of mind. This isn’t just a cliche, it’s reality. Those people don’t see me, and as much as I may have meant to them, when I’m not around, they go on with their lives, basing them around the people who actually are there on a regular basis. And I don’t blame them, as I of course do the same. The difference is that for me, there aren’t many (any) people – new or old – who are physically there on a regular basis. I really do see a big difference between how this whole dynamic played out in the early years of the past decade compared to the more recent years. Time may heal many wounds, but apparently it can also open new ones.

I write about this topic not so I can publicly say “Oh, woe is me.” Rather, it’s a way for me to sort out a lot of my feelings and experiences as I look back on 2019, as well as the several years preceding it, and consider what is my best course of action moving forward. And I’m hoping it is also of interest to you, because it may show you a side of human nature and behavior that is important but may be slightly outside your own range of direct experiences. The difference I noted between the feeling of first few years of being away and years 8, 9, and 10 is a real one, and it’s now forcing me to sit up, take notice, and make some changes.

My sense as I set some goals and targets for 2020 – not only in terms of the things I want to accomplish, but for how I want to live – is that both my need for real relationships and my drive to use more of my talents will be greatly enhanced by some kind of stability. The challenge is still where to make that stable base(s), because as I’ve said before so many times (many more times to myself than I’ve written in these pages), I want the perfect place. And the perfect place doesn’t exist, which has been a convenient excuse for me not to choose any place at all! What I have in my favor now is that the level of pain and dissatisfaction due to my lack of even an imperfect base is greater than it has been in the past, thus providing me more motivation to just get on with it and make something happen.

2019 – What, When, and Where?

One thing is for sure, I covered a lot of ground in 2019. In fact, I flew so much that for the first time ever I achieved Platinum status on United Airlines. That may seem like a good thing, but in reality it means that I burned a lot of my precious days (and nights) in airports, on planes, and everything associated with the road warrior lifestyle of a business traveler. I enjoy this at times, but by this point I recognize that I only have so many days left in my life, and every one I spend sitting on a flight for 20 hours is a day I will never get back. And it’s not great for my body, either. Still, hopefully my Platinum status will make my flying time more comfortable in 2020, even though I’d like to have less of it.

Here is how 2019 played out for me:

• I started the year visiting my friend Ed in Arizona, and on January 1 we drove down to Mexico and spent a few days in a (unseasonably chilly) beach town called Puerto Penasco.
• I headed back to Massachusetts for a week of (cold!) work, followed by a merciful decampment back to Mexico – briefly in the city of Oaxaca, followed by quite an extended stay at my favorite beach on the Oaxaca coast. Filled with great weather, yoga, and good food, this was one of the best periods of my year, without a doubt.

• In mid-March I left Mexico and had a flurry of business travel, along with a couple-week stint in Puerto Rico. Below you can see me on the golf course in PR.

• Landed in Portugal in early April and spent a month going from Porto in the north to Lisbon in the center to the Algarve region in the south. I found out that Portugal in April and into early May does not have as reliably warm weather as I had hoped/thought. While this year was an unseasonably cool spring all across southern Europe, it was still a lesson – if Portugal is going to be one of “my places,” and it certainly could be, then I probably can’t count on it to meet my needs weather-wise until the middle of May. Below are pictures of Porto and the Algarve.

• In early May I left Portugal for 3 days in Athens for some work – sadly, the only time I was in Greece all year. I didn’t make it to my beloved Crete. This was an active choice. As much as I love it on this heavenly island, it has a serious downside: I spend most of my time there alone. And I was already very clear that what I did not need was to set myself up for failure by going to a place where I was very confident I would be alone at a time when I strongly craved the opposite.
• From Greece I went back to the States, and among other things I attended a Memorial Day family reunion for my mother’s side of the family on the midwestern farm where she grew up. This was a fantastic experience, seeing aunts, uncles, and many of my more than 40 first cousins for the first time in decades.
• In early June I then headed off to Luxembourg for a couple of weeks, enjoying a tranquil time in this beautiful but slightly boring European paradise in the company of my good friend Alina, who is from Romania but has been living in Luxembourg for a few years and has become something of a Luxembourger.
• From Luxembourg I headed back to Lisbon, where I spent a month as I described above – yoga, new friends, beaches….and a bit too much alone time, dropping me fairly deeply into the doldrums, despite the positive aspects of this period. On paper this was one of the best times of the year for me, but emotionally it may have been the worst. Lisbon pictures are above.
• Back to the States in late July for another flurry of work, followed by 10 days in Thailand, where I worked for a day and then spent the rest of the time traveling a bit with my longtime travel buddy Tim, who was there on a visa run from Saigon, where he has been living for the past 2 years (since he and I spent a month in Cambodia to ring out the end of 2017 and ring in the start of 2018.) It was great seeing a good friend, though we both were somewhat frustrated with the overabundance of Chinese tourists who have ruined some of the places that used to be a lot nicer before being discovered and quickly destroyed by the Chinese crowd. If you don’t like these sentiments on the basis of political correctness, you need to travel to a place that once was nice and has since been taken over by the Chinese tourist hordes, and I think you will change your tune. And I might add that the way I have phrased it here was intentionally more politically correct than my actual sentiments, which I will reserve for my fellow long term travelers who know exactly what I’m talking about.
• Back to the States for a week of work, immediately followed by my early September “Around the world in 11 days” craziness of Singapore followed by Rio.  The trip was for work, but I had extra days at the beach in Rio, which was a great little respite for me, and a place that for me may exceed all other parts of South America.
• Back to the States I had work in New York, followed by a quick work trip to both the Austrian Alps and the Austrian capital of Vienna – which I like more every time I visit.
• Again back to the States and a rush to prepare to head down to Ecuador to meet up with my buddy Andrei, who happens to be from the same Romanian city as Alina (see Luxembourg above), and start our South American bike trip at the beginning of October. That trip has been ongoing until the present, and I will have more to say about it in an upcoming post. It was intended as a challenge, a very different experience to shake things up and break me out of the rut I’d felt myself in for quite some time. It has definitely done that, in more ways than one, and it has been a great addition to my life’s experiences.

• Since my arrival here in South America, I have been riding, from Ecuador to Bolivia, punctuated by an insane week of business travel in late November that involved 13 separate flights, taking me from Peru to China and back, followed by Brazil and back….and a return to the bike after a detour to Machu Picchu.
• And that brings me to the present, about to ring in 2020.

It is a bit of an exhausting list to contemplate. Just putting it down in one place is a good reminder to myself that this is probably not what I want to keep up, at least not at this level of intensity. As I said above, I remain skeptical of myself, because I have entered the new year a few times in recent history with a similar mandate, a head of steam, and a lot of motivation to make these types of changes….and I haven’t quite gotten it done. As a longtime Red Sox fan from well before they won the World Series in 2004 (and 2007, and 2013, and 2018), all I can say is that hope springs eternal, and this year is going to be different. The Red Sox proved it is possible in 2004, and I aim to prove it in 2020.

I hope to see many of you in the coming year, and I hope that my musings may have some value to your lives, even if the details are quite different from mine. I write this blog mainly for myself and the small group of you who read it loyally, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have you reading it. So thanks for another great year. 2019 is ending, and it has been wonderful reflecting on everything the year has been for me. In the grand scheme of things, it has actually been an outstanding year. My quibbles with it are just that – minor points that are not very difficult to change. My gratitude is for small problems, because I know so many people in our world have large ones. Maybe the theme for 2020 should be avoiding big problems and attacking small problems, because this is a challenge I believe we are all up to handling. I will do my part, starting right now.

Happy 2019, and Happy 2020.