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Someone posted this on Facebook today, and it touched me so deeply I want to share.  It is so easy to connect with people by any means that say “I see you.”  A compliment.  Remembering a name  Eye contact. Remembering a detail from the last conversation we had. Noticing a change in hair, a color that flatters, an extra sparkle in the eye or wrinkle in the brow.

Right now I am working on eliciting a smile from a particular person who works on the ship. A smile may be out of the question culturally, and I can see he is very intent on his job, so it is a challenge. Yesterday  I got a little wave from across the room.  Success!  On his terms, if not mine.  I say “I see you” by smiling and calling him by name.  His wave says “I see you back.”And as this poet says, these fleeting moments are what we have of if not the holy, at least a kind of grace. Thank you for seeing me by reading this.

I am in Saint Petersburg for the third time of six projected total visits this summer. I really had no idea how i would feel about going around and around the Baltic for two months, most of the time back and forth from Copenhagen to Stockholm.

Maybe I would be bored.  I mean, how many times can I visit Tallinn, Estonia, and still feel invigorated about it?

All I can say is, I still pinch myself and say, “lucky, lucky me!”

Today, visit three to Saint Petersburg (this year), second day:  I had for breakfast some perfect fruit someone else had cut up and cleaned up after.  Then i went and did a little upper body at the gym.  Reviewed and added a few of my own photos to my lecture on Stockholm.  Had a light lunch of salads and my big splurge dessert, bread pudding.  YUM!

Then, the day took on steam.  I used my visa to get off the ship and take a six-mile walk through St. Petersburg, along the Neva, then across the river and on to the Hermitage and up the big shopping street, Nevsky Prospekt.  Then I wandered back, past St. Isaac’s Cathedral and along a green strip,  across the river and to the ship.

Walking back through the main bar (sort of the Grand Central for the ship), I ran across a family i had met briefly before and sat down and chatted with them.  Of course i was immediately approached by a waiter who brought me some champagne which i had totally earned by then on my walk.

I went back then, took a shower, called Dan, and then went out to dinner with some lovely people in a beautiful restaurant, where I could eat and drink whatever I wanted, no charge. What i want at this point is very little, but it doesn’t matter.  I have what works for me, no more.

On my way back to my room, I stopped in the bar and listened to a Ukrainian pianist play the slow movement of The Moonlight Sonata.  Now, back in my room, i found myself wondering why anyone would ever ask if i am tired of this.

Let me explain in one word, if this description of my day doesn’t do it:  No.

Sure, there are many things I am missing in this nomadic, cruising  life: the powerful silence of nature, the humbling experience of great mountain peaks, the lovely affirmation of being truly alone.  But really, what i have is so wonderful I simply cannot express how warm and wooly I feel to have found this life.  Thank you, powers of the universe! I hope this photo of me and my visa, as i leave the ship,  says how much i know I am truly blessed.

Today I passed a milestone.  I finished the last lecture I had hoped to do before I leave for the Baltic in three day’s time.  I am already packed and with all major must-dos accomplished.  That gives me three whole days in which I don’t have to head straight from morning coffee into the study to work, or check a bunch of items off a to-do list.  Pure, free time!

So i thought I would spend a little of it catching up with myself via writing a blog post.  I’ve written in the past about feeling a little disoriented and disengaged from San Diego, and that continues.  I am still hovering outside myself measuring just how I am reacting, and discovering my most honest, basic thoughts.

About a week ago the renters in my condo moved out, leaving it vacant.  That was pretty great, because it enabled me to move my clothes that had been crammed in Dan’s closet and taking up space on his shelves.  I could get ready for my next trip by letting the sprawl get as big as it needed to be and last as long as was convenient for me.  As I started hanging clothes up in the empty closet, I thought, “wow, this is really nice,” and felt the first glimmers of reconnection with my condo.

Before, as I have written, whenever I saw the inside of my condo or even passed by the door, I felt nothing at all, as if it had no connection to me. Now here I was, happily moving about 5% of the way back in, however briefly.  And I liked it.  I even took a shower in “my” shower, something I haven’t done for fifteen months.

But it all seemed rather transactional, not personal.  When I was done, I left.  I still haven’t sat on the couch, for example, or made a cup of coffee there.

I realized that the feeling of grounding I got from hanging up the clothes was pretty much  the way it feels when I unpack on the ship.  it’s good to get things in order, to survey what I have. So I ended up thinking that the excitement of having space wasn’t really tied to it being my condo at all.  If it had been someone else’s I think I would have felt about the same.

Then, a second change. My son called to tell me he was moving back to California and when I learned he needed a place to stay, I decided to cancel looking for a new tenant and let him live in my place while I am in the Baltic this summer.  That meant bringing bedding and towels back from storage to get ready for him.

When I finished making the bed and saw my own bedspread as opposed to a bare mattress pad, it started to feel a little more like my place.  But as I write this I just realized that even though it looks so pristine and clean, and just as I like it, I didn’t even lie down on the bed when I was done.  I just noticed how nice it looked, and turned around and left.   No imprinting, no bonding.

I love metaphors and I wish there were a better one with the hangers.  I’m not hanging, I’m not hanging in, I’m not hanging on.  It’s more like I am hovering in midair, not needing a hanger at all. And not particularly wanting one.  Maybe the metaphor isn’t quite as lame as i thought. I am still floating very pleasantly in the present.  Maybe a time will come when I hang my clothes up with a sense of relief that I do have a place to nest for a while.  All I know is it hasn’t happened yet.

 

 

 

 

 

A little over a month ago I returned to San Diego after five months away on a series of cruise assignments. I haven’t written any entries here since I left the ship in Athens, and I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s because I have been puzzling over what to make of this extended time away from what has become my “real life” on ships.

Fifteen months now of Living Travelly and one month on land provides a good vantage point to examine life in the city I have called home for over half a century. It’s been a chance to step outside myself and ask what about life here in San Diego is genuine connection and what is habit, what the relationship is between familiarity and a true sense of  comfort, and the big question: what do I need to do to be what feels most authentically like the person I am now, and supports the growth I want to continue to have?

About five or six years ago, I felt a staleness in my life that I worked through by asking myself, “what about your life makes you feel as if you are growing by doing it, and what doesn’t?”  The upshot was that I quit both the boards I was serving on, because I saw no place that service was going.  More important, even though I still loved my work as a professor, I was ready to move on.  I used to think I would retire when they carried me out on a stretcher, but I understood at that point that to continue to grow as a teacher, I would have to reinvent how I taught, which wasn’t a goal I wanted to take on in my sixties. I could still do the all-in job of teaching that I always had, but now with an understanding that I wasn’t going anywhere with it beyond the value it had in and of itself.

I see life in San Diego now from the vantage point of this odd kind of half-return, one in which I can’t just fall into my old routines, because I vacated my condo to rent it out, and my car is on the other side of the country with my son.  But I can also see my life on ships at a bit more remove because I have been away longer than I ever have since I started this adventure.

So I ask the same question.  “What about your life on ships makes you feel as if you are growing by doing it.” The answer is still quite a lot.  Seeing things for myself is important to me, and I am seeing so much more of the world, however fleetingly, than I could ever hope to do with my own resources.  My brain is working ashore in ways I enjoy, making connections between things, evaluating what I think, turning book learning into tangible sights and sounds.  There is a constant parade of people onboard who provide stimulating conversation and opportunities to learn. I get to use my skills and knowledge in my lectures, and keep improving them as I see and learn more.

And in San Diego?  I keep occupied in San Diego mostly by working on lectures for upcoming assignments.  Beyond playing a little tennis and spending time with Dan and friends, I haven’t reconnected with my old life. I am not here long enough even to consider taking on any new activities. I am marking time as productively as I can, but little more.

I basically do two things with my life now: cruise, and prepare for cruises.

But I hear a drone in the background. I won’t continue to Live Travelly forever.  I have my bookings already through the end of 2020, and there will be significant enough breaks between them ( by choice) that I will need to resume living in my condo and get a car. That will probably help me feel a little more grounded here, but is that what I want?  I don’t think I upheaved my comfortable life just to go back to it. It won’t be enough for me. And I am not the same me.

I won’t be able to hide behind work on lectures when I have fewer assignments and most itineraries already prepared.  I will be smack up against the need to find and embrace what’s next.  I know, I know—there are lots of things to do.  The old saws—take up a new hobby, volunteer. But absent any belief that something new represents a direction for growth of a sort I want, they are more like should than wants, and I have promised myself I won’t be ruled by should any more.

I don’t have to decide anything now, and for that I am grateful. Tennis this morning, then work on a lecture.  My life at the moment. That, plus what still feels like limitless opportunities to keep growing.  All I have to do is rise up to meet them.

 

I am a few hours in to my flight back to San Diego from Athens and am writing somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.  I disembarked this morning and the ship already feels very far away.

It’s been an overwhelming five-plus months, since I flew to Singapore back on December 3. Last year— now it’s the middle of May already! One day has come and gone, replaced by the next one, and on and on. It doesn’t seem as if any time has passed at all, but yet, when I review everywhere I have visited my astonishment grows.

I visited in the last half year alone, 55 places in 21 countries, spread over 4 continents (6 if you count India and the Middle East separately). And that isn’t even counting the first eight months of my Years of Living Travelly, which started in South America, and took me to Europe, Africa, the Baltic, Alaska, Canada  and the Eastern Seaboard  of the US.

I don’t even know how many different lectures I have given since December, but my guess is over 40, the vast majority prepared from scratch in the year or so I spent getting ready for this.

I suspect people back home  are going to ask me to rattle off various sorts of things—highlights, favorites, surprises, and the like, and I must admit I am dreading dealing with that, probably multiple times, when I am home. It’s rather like seeing someone you haven’t laid eyes on for twenty years and asking, “so, what have you been up to?”  I  hardly know what to say, but in the interest of practicing, here are a few standouts.

I was really surprised by how much I liked Asian cities. I fell in love with Hong Kong, and really enjoyed being in Singapore, Ho ChinMinh City, Yogyakarta, and Bangkok.  Mumbai as well.  I loved the bustle, and the foreignness of people selling strange street food, seeing  pagodas instead of churches, and just experiencing how people go about their lives.

Another surprise was the beautiful Philippine Islands, and on the other side, discovering that I came to the Maldives too late to see the paradise I had pictured. And though I wasn’t bowled over by Bali, I think I can conclude with certainty that any country that grows rice (and I saw quite a few) is going to have loads of beautiful scenery.

I was saddened by the poverty I saw so many places, and sobered to learn that much of the hope for development is coming from Chinese investments. When the dust settles, China will effectively own many Asian countries, it seems, and the saddest part is that they are building for themselves and their convenience, not to improve the lives of the locals—resorts for Chinese tourists, roads and bridges to modernize these countries to make them more attractive to the Chinese.  Built, in many cases, with imported Chinese workers, leaving the impoverished people of places like Sihanoukville, Cambodia (one place I observed this Chinafication) no better off.

Okay, I have my first  batch of talking points taken care of, except to add that, as with any travel, I come back with more of a sense of human commonality,  and with my heart—how can I put this?— a little closer to the surface.  When a community suffers, I care a little more, both for places I have been, like Christchurch, and places I have not. I picture children playing, old people with wisdom written on their faces and troubles written in their bones, young people hanging out with their friends or playing their courtship games, people riding on rickety bicycles or motorbikes with impossible piles of just about everything (including extra people) heaped on board, women with their beautiful little ones in slings on their backs, and i wish health, safety, and happiness for them, along with everyone else making their way in this demanding, difficult, often terrifying and sometimes transcendently beautiful world.

What up next for me is six weeks of heavy lifting, as I prepare talks for Scandinavia and the Baltic this summer, plus a gig that will take me from Lisbon to London to New York in the fall. Further out, I am booked to return to Dubai in November to cross the Indian Ocean to Singapore and then spend about two months in Australia and New Zealand over the holidays, returning home in February 2020.  No five- month stints, though. The longest is about three.  My excitement for doing this is undimmed, and I can hardly wait for the next adventure. But for now, a few weeks in San Diego will be adventure enough!

Several days ago I went on a shore excursion from the port of Safaga, Egypt, to Karnak Temple and the Valley of the Kings and Queens in Luxor.  Despite the long bus ride (3.5 hours each way), this had been the most eagerly anticipated event of my entire assignment from Mumbai to Athens.

I was lucky enough a number of years back to go to Cairo and Alexandria, but wondered how in the world I was ever going to manage to get farther south to see the great monuments of the New Kingdom, particularly Karnak and the Mortuary Shrine at Deir al Bahri of one of my heroines, the Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who was chiseled out of the historical record  for the audacity of having been a woman on the throne.

This unanticipated chapter in my life, when I can spend pretty much all my time exploring the world, has taken me so many places that, quite frankly, I would never have been able to see on my own dime.  It has also given me the ability to focus my money on side trips between cruises to places like Bhutan and New Zealand and on longer stays in embarkation and debarkation points like Hong Kong and Singapore.

And it’s not over yet.  Insha’Allah (If God wills it), as my Muslim friends say to avoid sounding cocky about the future, I have another nine months of pretty much full time traveling ahead before I plan to scale it back at least enough to make it worthwhile to reclaim my condo from the renter and my car from my son and live at least a slightly more settled life.  Maybe.  Who knows?

This is a long preamble to the modest point I want to make in this blog post.  I have, in at least one post, focused on what is clearer  about myself since I began My Year(s) of Living Travelly. One thing I already made note of was driven home more forcefully in my short time in Egypt.

I came on this excursion to be bowled over by Karnak and by the tomb of  Nefertari, recently opened to the public after a major, state-of-the-art restoration.  Both lived entirely up to expectations.  But what I found myself most moved by, and thinking about the most in the days that followed, was what I observed about Ramadan from the window of the coach.

We happened to be there on the first day of Ramadan, and were told not to worry, that it should have no impact on our tour.  And the shore excursion folks were absolutely right about that in one sense.  Nothing was closed, nothing slowed down.  In fact one of the strongest features of this month of daylight fasting is that life does go on.  People were doing their jobs, from standing sentry on the highway, to  carrying hay on a donkey cart to their animals, to selling produce to people who were preparing the dinner that would break the fast or daytime meals for  children and the ill, who do not fast.

But in another more emotionally resonant way, they got all wrong.  It did impact my trip.  It made it infinitely richer. Sure, I knew from teaching world religions for many years, about the rules of Ramadan, but I knew very little about the culture of it. On the way back, the sun was going down and the first day of fasting was coming to an end.  The energy I could see and sense through the coach window was palpable (though the photos I took are pretty blurry). It still wasn’t dark, but people were hovering near tents and open spaces where long tables had been set up, and a whole pita bread was already sitting on each plate.

The mosques were lit up with strings of lights, and the joy of the moment was written on all the faces.  Everyone was waving to us as we passed.  One guide said half0jokingly that we had better not stop because if anyone got on board we would all be invited to break the fast with them, and we wouldn’t make it back to the ship before it sailed. A far cry from our fear-ridden society, where the idea  of a Muslim breaking onto a bus would be more likely to instill terror in the heart.

One of our escorts had a box stored overhead on the bus, which he got down and devoured the contents of as soon as it was officially okay.  On the streets, people were handing out styrofoam containers filled with food to anyone who needed one. Someone came along with a big tray full of cups of coffee ready to give out to passersby.

One of the things I think the west has failed to understand about Islam is the cohesion that being Muslim offers in this world.  All around the world, as the sun sets in their time zone, this scene of breaking the fast was being repeated, just as all around the world, like the wave in a stadium, five times a day, as prayer time comes, Muslims take their turn falling to their knees to remember Allah and reaffirm their submission to  his will. Circling the world over and over again in perpetuity—what a powerful bond that must create. It was such a privilege to see a little glimpse.

When I remember that day, I will recall standing among the immense columns of the the Temple at Karnak, and the dazzling colors of the beautiful love story Ramses ordered painted on the tomb of his beloved wife Nefertari. But the most indelible impression will be of smiling people waving at us, piles of styrofoam containers of food,  and flashing colored lights on mosques as the shadows deepened and the day drew to a close.

 

A historical novelist friend of mine once said in a speech at a conference, “while you are writing about the past, don’t forget to live in the present.”  My reaction to this day tells me I am getting better at that.

What I think this  experience, and indeed all my experiences in my travels, was really about is the reaffirmation of the fact that I can admire the past, visit its monuments, wonder at its achievements, and imagine its vitality, but right now is what is real, and today is the only place I live.

 

Today I leave Dubai, in my journey westward from Asia toward my home in California. Still many exciting places to see, but this marker point of the embarkation  day for the  final cruise in this series has gotten me feeling reflective. I am closing out my five-months of non-stop travel that began in early December in Singapore and will end with a flight to San Diego from Athens in mid-May. I thought I would spend a little time today pondering what is more so, less so, and still the same about me.

First, let’s dispense with the physical.

I am definitely chubbier. Not a lot, but definitely. No scale to assess the precise damage. I still fit in all the clothes I brought, including the pants, but what was loose is now snug, and that 5% spandex in the fabric is probably disguising more than a little. They say people gain five to seven pounds on a typical cruise, so I guess I could have gained fifty or more just in the last five months! Near the beginning of these Years of Living Travelly I wrote about my diet rules, and so far, they are still working pretty well.

Likewise, I am definitely flabbier. Maybe my clothes fit, but I am definitely out of shape. I am really looking forward to getting back to my gym and tennis schedule. I just don’t like small hotel gyms, and basically the ship is a small(ish) hotel. I tell myself every cruise that at the least I could get down on the floor and do a hundred ab crunches every day, but do I do it? The percent of the time would be, if not absolute, at least statistical zero. The trouble with many Asian and Indian Ocen stops is that the cruise terminals are in industrial ports, which means you can’t just get off the ship and walk around, as you can do a majority of places in the Med, or Baltic, or Alaska. In those ports I easily walk 4-6 miles in a day. Here, hardly at all. Add to that the weather, which is so hot that even if you were to find a place to walk, it won’t be for very long unless you don’t value your brain cells. As the song goes, in this part of the world, only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

Now on to the stuff that actually matters.

I am more present. I often can’t remember where I was a few days ago, but I do feel more present in the actual day. Every port provides such unique opportunities to see new things, form the sensory perceptions you can’t get from photos, and notice small details about places , people, and cultures. I pay attention in ways I often don’t do at home, and I like that. Maybe that is why people come back so refreshed from vacations, because this feeling of being only in the moment is such a powerful restorative.

I have written before about feeling more comfortable in my own skin than at any point in my life, but this feels especially true at this juncture. I have pushed my boundaries, said “okay” to possibilities I might have turned down before, tried new things, retried old things I hadn’t much liked, solved problems, struck out on my own for new adventures, and been successful at pretty much everything. Well, with the noticeable exception of trying a traditional dance in Bhutan (I am all left feet when it comes to anything that require specific, coordinated steps). But I did it, however badly, instead of saying no.

My moods most of the time generally run the gamut from happy to happier, but I can’t think of a time in my life that I have been happier than I am right now. There are things every day to say “wow!” about, and blessings beyond number in my life.

And finally, remember the line from Alice in Wonderland about things getting “curiouser and curiouser?” Well that applies to how I feel as well. This beautiful opportunity has raised what was always a pretty healthy amount of curiosity to even greater heights. No, I am nowhere near having seen enough. Life grows in beauty and abundance and I want it all!

 

 

This morning at breakfast in Bhutan, my travel partner Susan and I got to talking about how our views on longevity have changed.  I mentioned that I am making an effort in my Years of Living Travelly to go to places like Corregidor, rather than the “easier” places in a port of call, because I understand so much better now what it means to die young. 

I used to think that whether one lives twenty, or eighty years, or points in between, any lifetime is really a blink of the eye when one considers time in the abstract.  All the dead aren’t here anymore, regardless of how long they lived.  

True, but yet….

When I think now of people who died young, I understand so much better what it means not to have had the opportunity to experience everything that can happen in a long lifetime.  I think of all my opportunities to learn, to travel, to make friends, to love.  It’s all that, and a host of simple things as well, like  hearing a new song that becomes a favorite, wiggling toes in  sand, the first sip of icy beer on a hot day, or watching a baby discover just about anything.

The previous day, when we saw the thousands of prayer flags that flutter on bridges, near shrines,  and pretty much everywhere there is a breeze or a memory, we decided we wanted to put up some flags of our own.  I wanted to honor my friend Peter, whose happiness when he came back from Bhutan made me put it on my bucket list. He had been just about everywhere, and it was one of his favorite trips. Peter died not too long after that, and Bhutan was his last travel adventure. I have Peter to thank for making it one of mine as well.

We began today shedding a few tears  about people we have lost. In the afternoon we went to the longest suspension footbridge in Bhutan. ( pictured at top), carrying the bundle of prayer flags we had bought the day before.  I put up one string of flags for Peter, to invoke his spirit in this beautiful place and to say thank you.  Here I am with his flags.

But those of you who know me well probably know what this journey to the bridge was really about. 

This is the twentieth anniversary year  of the death of my son Adriano.  I wish he had stayed in this world longer than twenty-two years, but he didn’t want to. I think of how much he has missed, but I have to acknowledge that mixed in with all that he might have enjoyed, there was most likely a disproportionate amount of pain and disappointment that he has not had to suffer.  

Grief  that softens  over time as part of healing can be, in an instant, raw again. But rawness is good too, because it brings us closer to those we have lost, before we tuck them away again in the emotional labyrinth that life becomes after something so heart blistering happens.

I wanted to be raw again in Bhutan today, because I wanted to honor his spirit and say again to him how much I love him.  There is a timelessness and a purity I can’t really explain about the love I feel for someone I haven’t been able to see, touch, hear, or talk to for two decades now.Nothing can tarnish that love’s beautiful, burnished shine. The good memories win.  

In the letter he left behind before he took his life, he said if there was something after death, he would be out there surfing the universe.  I always think of him that way.  And here in the foothills of the Himalayas, as close to the concept of eternal time as one can get on earth, I think that if indeed there is surfing to be done in the afterlife, he has simply beat me to it by a cosmic second.  

I heard somewhere that the Northern Lights are reflected off dust in the atmosphere, so I took some of his ashes to the top of Norway the year after his death and I flung them as high as I could into the sky. I wanted him forever to be part of that dust.  Now he is part of the Himalayas as well. As am I, because I left a little of my heart on that bridge too.  

In this part of the world, these flags are really more about hope for good fortune for the living, not memorials to the dead.  And that was part of what I was after today as well. I wanted to leave the flags at a bridge because bridges are symbols of transition—sometimes  sad, as when a loved one  leaves us,  but they also stand for hope and for the fact that to be truly alive we must embrace change.

The real finality of death is that it is the last bridge we cross.  But neither I nor anyone I love is there yet, at least if our good fortune holds. So the deepest meaning of today for me—and the biggest surprise—was how joyful I felt. Even playful, as this photo of me with one of Adriano’s flags shows, although my eyes are red with tears behind the glasses.

.The flags are for good fortune and I am grateful for the abundance of that in my life. The joy today came from thinking about the future  for my son Ivan and myself, that we still have not only bridges to find, but bridges to make.  

It’s raining in Bhutan tonight, a sound I haven’t heard, and a fragrance and freshness I haven’t breathed for a long time.  Out there in the dark,  two strings of flags are limp with rain.  Tomorrow the warmth of the sun will raise them up to flutter and wave beneath the hovering peaks, and lend their colors to the river. below the bridge, bringing snowmelt from the Himalayas down to the sea. I am headed there myself in a few days, as my life adventure continues. I am leaving something behind, though, and carrying something far bigger with me, in the mark this has made on my heart.  

I have learned something about being a pedestrian in these crazy Asian cities with thousands of motorbikes whizzing by like biblical locust plagues. It seems pretty clear that if you wait for a break in traffic you will die of old age before you ever get across the street.

What you need to do, I was told, is look down the street for whatever is coming in the next few seconds, avoid stepping in front of it, but then just walk out steadily and calmly .  Look straight ahead and whatever you do,  do not look at the traffic. People on motorbikes will see you and plan their route to avoid a collision.  What causes accidents is pedestrian second guessing—seeing  something coming and reacting by stopping or speeding up.  Just breathe and walk.

And it works. It is a crazy feeling to cross the street almost as if you were blind, but I’m still in one piece.

“There must be a lesson in this,” I thought to myself.  And of course, when I think there’s a lesson, I can usually come up with one, so for what it’s worth, here it is.   It’s easy to be stopped in our tracks by too much information, in this case the data point represented by every bike whizzing towards you.  It’s easy to think you need to react to everything, when in fact, the opposite is true.  Dithering can be deadly to an idea or action whose time has come.  Second guessing decisions, getting wrapped up in “what if’s,” can be utterly paralyzing.

And it not just uncertainties in our personal lives that the constant whoosh of too much input affects.  In these awful times, it is easy to get sucked into following every story and getting outraged over every horror of the daily news cycle. It’s all motorbikes bearing down on our vulnerable, frightened psyches.

Sure, this is oversimplified, but there is something to it. There’s always something headed  straight for us, often a whole streetful of things. We can focus on that  and get slammed, or we can step out, look straight ahead and just keep going.

 

You know the expression about never forgetting how to ride a bike?  Well, I tested it out today on Palau Ubin, an offshore island in Singapore.  I was looking for something to do after I checked in at the airport for my early flight to the Maldives tomorrow, and saw this island mentioned on a number of online “top attractions” lists.  Since it is accessed by the Changi Village Ferry Terminal and the airport is also in the suburb of Changi, I figured it sounded perfect.

I got to chatting with the hotel concierge, and he said  it was a good choice, since the island looks pretty much like Singapore looked before the colonial days.  He told me the best way to get around Palau Ubin is by bicycle. I responded without hesitation, “I think  I’ll just walk around a bit.” Then, as I was in the cab, I had a conversation with myself that went something like this:

Brave Laurel:  You know, you were planning on doing some bicycling this summer in the Baltic, since you have been to the ports many times before and that would be something different to do.

Chicken Laurel: Well, yes, but I was going to practice when I got home…

Brave Laurel: But this island is flat and it would be the perfect spot just to see how it goes.

Chicken Laurel: But I haven’t ridden a bike for over fifty years!

Brave Laurel: That will still be true in San Diego or the Baltic. If you won’t do it today, what makes you think you will do it then?

Chicken Laurel: Oh, okay, I’ll check out the bikes and if they look pretty basic, I’ll …well, I’ll think about it.

Fast forward. I have now ridden over to the island  on a “bumboat” (private boats that offer ferry service). This photo of the taxi service will give you an idea of the infrastructure of the place. Not a car or even a tuktuk in sight, and I wonder whether taking a taxi means you just jump onto the handlebars.

 

Then to my existential dread, I passed by a bike rental place.  The proprietors called out to me to rent one of their bikes.

Chicken Laurel: “Well….maybe.  I’ll have to think about it.”

Brave Laurel:  Bad, bad girl!

The proprietor pointed to a bike, and I agreed to go up the road a few yards to see if I could avoid maiming myself or someone else.  I actually did it without crashing, but it was pretty terrifying because the bike seemed so bulky.  The owner found another, scaled-down version, and I tried that out.  Lo and behold,  I managed a little better.

Brave Chicken Laurel set out on the bike and discovered several things.  First I was okay if I was not going too fast or anything other than in a straight line.  Second, that is not always possible, and I did a lot of stopping to make minor adjustments in my trajectory if I had to turn or found myself headed for a ditch. I also have no thigh strength for anything more than a slight incline.  But all that is minor compared to the thrill that Brave Laurel had won.

The  ride was beautiful, as this one image will show.

Forty  minutes later I brought the bike back. If you picture me whizzing down the road with my hair blowing back and my girlhood bike skills miraculously resurrected, forget it.    My fingers were twisted with cramps from having gripped the handlebars so tightly the whole time, and I felt halfway to a heart attack with anxiety, but I did it—

I did it!  I even managed a sweeping turn back to the shop by the end, although it almost landed me in the grass.  I beamed all the way back on the boat.

And yes, riding a bike after fifty years is just like—well, like riding a bike. You don’t forget the basics, but the rest is a different matter.  Chicken Laurel is not salivating to do it again, but the primary question of whether I am capable of it has been answered in the affirmative.

Here I am with my bike, below.  Too bad the photo the bike shop owner took makes it look as if I have gained fifty pounds, or maybe it’s just that the photo got a little stretched out in the post,   but I am so stoked about this accomplishment that I will share it anyway.

I think the conversation Brave and Chicken Laurel were having was really about something else altogether.  It was about pushing past boundaries and fulfilling promises to myself about not being so risk-averse that I miss out on the best things about being alive.  I rediscovered snorkeling in the Philippines and bike riding in Singapore.  I am rooting for Brave Laurel to keep Chicken Laurel on the straight and narrow, but in bike riding, sooner or later, I’ll have to learn how to turn.