Diary

Sometimes I sit down with a blank screen and no focus for my thoughts and just see what pops out. This is one of those times. It feels like I might have something to say but damned if I know what it is!

Day 2 of 2022.  I am at sea on a surprisingly  cool day just trying to pass some time until the pace picks up with lunch and a talk to give this afternoon. I’m at sea instead of poking around Gustavia, St. Bart’s because the authorities there denied us permission to land. We have had a smattering of cases over the last week, none serious that I know of, and these little islands with limited resources to handle outbreaks among their own people simply aren’t taking any chances. 

Every guest I have chatted with is okay with this change in itinerary, but I suspect we won’t be landing in Virgin Gorda tomorrow either, since the British Virgin Islands folks have been among the strictest about turning ships away. Really feeling for the crew, who have to keep happy faces painted on, when they may soon start disappearing from many guests’ public presentations of themselves if this starts turning into a cruise to nowhere. 

I just focus on doing my job to the exacting standards I self-impose. That’s what keeps me grounded ( odd expression when at sea). However,  I am increasingly glad to go no further than my balcony, or to a small, practically secret sun deck  a few steps from my door. 

Well, it turns out I really don’t have much to say.  No finding of great meaning in any of this. That’s okay too. The year is still young. 

You know those movies where the star is looking at something and it gets blurry and music comes up and suddenly we’re back in time, at some critical juncture at the star’s life?

I have been having those feelings the last few days as I have sat in the show lounge on Seabourn Odyssey staring at the Christmas tree on stage. It’s nothing spectacular—just a plain tree with colored lights—but I have found it transfixing. It takes me back to Christmas 1964, the beginning of my sophomore year of high school.  

I was at the end of a long run of different schools in different towns, having moved after seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. I didn’t like myself much at twelve, and even less at thirteen. I was seriously overweight and just starting to notice that personal hygiene mattered. Then, amazingly, I grew three inches without gaining any weight, and actually had curves rather than voluminous mounds of baby fat.  In ninth grade, to my amazement, boys started to notice me. No one remembered the other me who had lived in those other places in that other body. It was the best thing that could have happened to me.

In the summer of 1964, before my sophomore year, my family moved to La Jolla, California.  The transformation continued, but now—wow!—I was permitted to date. Life opened up. I was a new person, the teenage me.  And wonder of wonders, the teenage me wasn’t a total dork.

I remember distinctly so many of the details of that Christmas, when I had just turned fifteen . I even remember what I wore to the midnight service at the church we attended.  I remember a couple of the parties I went to. I remember the boy who had just dumped me and the other boy I just met who became my first serious boyfriend. I remember the music.

‘I’m in love with her, and I feel fine…”

“Time is on my side…”

‘’Girl, you really got me now…”

‘Something tells me I’m into something good”

But most of all I remember the blissful wonder at the sense that my life had started. Childhood was over, and this next chapter was going to be so much more exciting.

And it was.  It was exciting, and scary, and heartbreaking, and frustrating, and confusing, and exhilarating. It was a door opening on that liminal period where I got to practice at adulthood without taking on the responsibilities of it.  

This was the first of many points in my life where I have felt as if I were walking through a door into a new life.  I went to college, I got married, I became a mother, I changed careers, I got divorced, I had lovers, I lost lovers, I navigated life on my own. 

Maybe that’s why I have been staring at that Christmas tree twinkling on the stage. It is reminding me of that girl, who became, through so many iterations, the person I am. I look back at her, and I see her strengths.  I see her vulnerabilities.  I see qualities that will lead her astray.  I see qualities that will give her the courage she will need to face what lies ahead. I see a life  that she cannot imagine at fifteen, at thirty, at fifty. I see what she will have to embrace, reject, forgive, withstand, and love with abandon. Even then, she is nurturing all that I will become. 

I am sitting in my son Ivan’s apartment in Phoenix, having come from San Diego today to pick him up to fly to the Caribbean for the first real vacation we have taken together. Tonight we do the red-eye to New York, where we catch our flight to Sint Maarten. 

I am still trying to put my finger on why travel feels so different to me now. I used to think it was because I no longer have a permanent home, but I suspect now that there is another dimension as well.  I got rid of well over 90% of my possessions when I sold my condo and moved to Victoria. I have a small storage locker there, filled primarily with important papers, a bit of memorabilia I don’t want to part with, books, and out-of-season clothes.  The contents of that storage locker, plus my car, are the sum total of what I own in this world, other than what is in those two suitcases over there in the entryway of Ivan’s apartment.  

In San Diego, as I was packing to head out to Phoenix, I couldn’t find a favorite jacket. If it wasn’t in my suitcase, I must have left it on the last ship, I thought, but I didn’t see how that was possible, since I checked my room thoroughly and surely would have noticed. 

Yes, it’s true that traveling means living only with what one brought, at least temporarily (well, except for shopping.). But there was something about staring at those two bags and realizing, “This is it. This is the bulk of what I own.” I couldn’t call up visions of a walk-in closet, a dresser packed with things I didn’t bring, to soften the impact. In moments of loss, even of something as minor as a jacket, the consequences of what I have chosen leap out to grab me. Fortunately that feels far more often like a caress than a slap. 

There is more to this nomadic life I have chosen than simply not having a permanent home.  It means truly living only out of suitcases and storage boxes. I am always moving with my possessions from place to place, varying slightly what I have to fit the adventure I am on. That’s why both every place and no place is ‘home.” It’s hard to explain, but sitting here right now in another unfamiliar place, just seeing my bags over by the door grounds me.  Just knowing that my winter clothes and boots are waiting in the dark in that locker in Victoria grounds me too. 

The story has a happy ending: I found the jacket. I had worn it the last evening on the ship and because  I had already packed and locked my bags, I stashed it in a zipper compartment on the outside of one suitcase.  Being very lightweight, it was easy not to notice it wedged down there. I am really glad I still have it, but sometimes it takes losing something, even if temporarily, to break open one’s thinking to find something even more important.

Since I touched down in Montenegro nearly three months ago, I haven’t traveled by plane anywhere, and incremental travel from one place to another doesn’t give the same feeling of closure ( or opening) as a sudden relocation in a distant place. Maybe that’s why I have been feeling reflective today as I prepare to leave the ship and fly to San Diego for a visit with friends.  

Among those reflections is how it has been to be phoneless for the six weeks since I left my iPhone  on a train in Geneva. Honestly, I haven’t missed it that much. The main function I truly could not manage without was the clock. I hated the idea of wearing a wristwatch, so I bought a little watch with a carabiner-style clip that I attached to my bag, and problem solved.  

 I quickly forgot about taking pictures, and it was quite liberating. I saw people endlessly documenting their experiences, and I thought how nice it was just to be enjoying mine.  I will start taking photos again when I have a phone, but I hope I have learned a lesson from this about making sure I am not so busy creating memories that I forget to have experiences.

Sometimes I wish I had my app that tells me how many steps I took on a long day, and I am presently locked out of my bank account and a few other sites because I can’t receive either a text or a call to prove who I am.  Occasionally I could have solved a problem with a phone call, but really everything can wait. So much truly can wait, or doesn’t really need to be done at all.  

Most important, though, is that when I have a few minutes to spare, I don’t have a phone to pull out.  As a result, I  sit quietly, or walk—or maybe even talk to someone! I think, I imagine, or I just enjoy what is there, whether it is people watching, or  the scenery of a place I have gone to the trouble of visiting. Much, much better than finding out what I might have missed in the last few minutes. or ignoring my surroundings in favor of a rousing game of solitaire.

My second insight relates to my evolving sense of “home.” This is my first cruise assignment since I sold my condo and began my life as a vagabond. My assignments are usually long enough to establish a sense of a home base on a ship, but there was always that other place where my stuff was, where my mail would be delivered, where my car was parked.  A place where I would walk in, drop my bags and say, “ahh, it’s still here.” 

I don’t have that anymore, and it does make a difference.  For me, “home” is now wherever I am.  I love Victoria.  It is the place I choose to be when I am not somewhere else. It is enough of a home to meet my needs. I am excited to go to San Diego, but it isn’t home anymore.  Right now, as I prepare to pull out my bags from under the bed and pack to leave the ship, the future is full of places I am going to, all of which I anticipate with pleasure, but none of which are ”home.”

Do I miss things about having a stable life?  Yes!  I miss my blender and my French press.  I miss having everything where I can get to it immediately. I miss knowing the best place to buy things I want and need. I miss easier access to many longtime friends.  I miss having  a lot of little things be so much easier. What do I gain by going without? The world.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

Archibald MacLeish‘s, “Ars Poetica” is one of the poems that have stayed lodged in my mind since I first began studying literature, and these two lines are among my favorites:

Every year at this time I see friends posting photos of the trees where they live, or their romps through fallen leaves.  It is indeed a glorious show nature puts on, but I recently learned something about maples, aspens, and other showy fall trees that has transformed the season’s  meaning for me.

Leaves don’t “change colors.” When a leaf unfurls it contains chlorophyll for photosynthesis. We see it as green, but in fact all the colors it will become are hidden under the green our eyes perceive. When autumn approaches, the tree no longer needs its leaves, and the chlorophyll fades. It is only then that we see the other colors that were always there.

That thought stops me in my tracks.  Aren’t our own lives like that?  When I was younger I thought I knew myself.  I thought I presented who I really was to the world.  But it is only in getting older that I can see the deeper nuances, the colors that were essential to who I am, but that I had not yet fully appreciated. 

As we get older, we see ourselves stripped to essentials, the distractions of green youth now faded. The rich hues that are the through lines of our lives emerge to show us the path we have always been on, the values that have kept us whole even when we were shattered, the moral compass that brought us to shore when we were adrift. 

 I first understood the word “autumnal” when I heard it applied to the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss.  The music is full of the history of grief, all the empty doorways, all the fallen maple leaves.  Some things can only be understood when life becomes bittersweet, when we see our hidden colors and wish we had appreciated them sooner. 

When we become autumnal. There is no better season for the poetry our lives are writing.  As MacLeish puts it, “A poem should not mean, but be.”  There is poetic meaning to be found in the leaves of autumn.  I found some for myself in what I am writing here. But really what they whisper to us is just to be. To dance in the golden light because we are, and we are still becoming.

Years ago, when I was around 40, I  was convinced that I was supposed to go to Vienna.  It wasn’t an idle thought about a place it might be fun to visit, but more like a compelling need. I believed that there was something there I was supposed to find. 

This was before search engines on the internet, and I had only a vague idea about what Vienna would look like, but this vision of where  I needed to go was quite concrete.  There would be a bridge in the city, and right where the bridge met the street, there would be steps down, and on those steps something waited for me.

I wasn’t at all clear on what it was.  Maybe someone I would meet, maybe an object I would find, maybe a flash of insight I would have. I just needed to go, and I would find out.

My then-husband and I were traveling in Europe frequently by that point, and since I was in charge of planning our trips, I could have made Vienna a focal point, but somehow I never did.

Just in the last few years I have been able to tease out a few threads of the tangled, matted mess of our relationship, and I think I know now why I kept this need to go to Vienna a secret.  I wasn’t  supposed to go with him.  What was supposed to happen couldn’t, while the energy of travel was so taken up with his demands, his shallowness, his whims.

So we never went.  And in the decades after the divorce, I never went either.

A few months ago I began my most ambitious solo travel adventure, seven weeks on public transportation through the Adriatic and across Europe to Barcelona to catch the ship I am currently on. The itinerary was fluid.  I changed my mind often about where I wanted to go, and many evenings I spent poring over maps.  Towards the end, as I always do, I started thinking about where I would go when I next had the opportunity to travel.  Budapest, maybe?  Bucharest? What’s in Slovakia?  Macedonia? 

But never Vienna.  I never even considered including it.

Recently my former fixation on Vienna came to mind.  What was that about?  Why, if there was something so important there, had I simply forgotten about going to find it?

And then I realized that it was never really about Vienna at all.  I was in a marriage of unequals, in which I was being gaslit, taken advantage of, and regularly betrayed.  I was not ready to acknowledge this.  I loved him.  He was lively and fun.  Our combined income was high enough to buy our way out of having to work on the serious, fundamental differences between us.  Travel was the ultimate symbol of our “success.”

I get it now. I didn’t want to go to Vienna with him because going there was really about him. I needed to escape, and I wasn’t ready. Eventually I went to that bridge.  I found what I was supposed to find— the will to cross it, the courage to leave. I just did it in my own head without going to Vienna at all.

I am in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway through a crossing from Europe to North America (Lisbon to Miami precisely). Tonight I decided to have dinner by myself on the pool deck of Seabourn Ovation, my current assignment.  

The night is surprisingly balmy.  No need for the puffer vest and wool socks I expected I would be wearing. No need for the blankets and heat lamps they provide when the weather is colder. After some lovely wine and a bit of dinner, I sank into one of those states where I just wanted to be there right then, totally, while at the same time reflecting on how I got here, and what lies ahead. Sometimes I think “living in the moment” is most satisfying when past and future come to the rich party in my head. 

I have a friend joining me in Miami whom I have known since my twenties, when we taught together at San Diego State University. She has known me since before I finished my Ph.D., in the time when my two toddler sons were “helping” me type my dissertation. How in the world could I have predicted that a graduate degree in English would lead to the life I have now?  It was hard enough to imagine how I could make it to my seventies, but here I am. 

It’s an odd feeling to realize that I am in the middle of the Atlantic, on a speck of a ship.  After dinner I came back to my room and sat on the veranda in the dark listening to the waves.  They roar to a crescendo as they throw out their white spume, then hiss away into nothing as the next one takes their place.  I see our movement, but the sea is so vast I can almost hear it laughing. It has us in its grip and it is letting us pass. We only think we are important. It can wipe away our arrogance as it wills.  Or flirt with us with its most radiant beauty, as this morning ( photo here).

I am utterly content with my life right now. I am not sure I could ever have said that so heartily in the past. Yes, I have loved a lot of chapters in my life, but they came with burdens I still remember. Now everything I own is either with me right now, or in a storage locker in Victoria. Except for my car, parked in the condo garage of friends, I have no other possessions or responsibilities and I even sometimes think the car has to go. The people I love and who love me back are with me in spirit, and I see many of them as often now as I did when I lived closer. Everything I do, I am doing with unprecedented confidence. I am gliding through my life, much as this beautiful ship slips through the water tonight. 

So I guess the reason tonight resonates so much is that it reminds me of how small my footprint now is, but how much energy this life in flux gives me.  I am moving away from the wake of what has been and toward whatever lies ahead. The ship vibrates with the power of the waves, and I feel it in my bones. 

Yesterday on La Gomera, one of the lesser known of the Canary Islands, I was ambushed by emotions about the people i most intensely wished were there with me. The first was my late husband, Jim, who was an even bigger geology nerd than I am. La Gomera is one huge shield volcano, meaning that instead of going off in a way that creates the typical cone shape, it builds up through many leaks of lava on its surface. This resulted on La Gomera in massive numbers of volcanic plugs, the magma that didn’t quite make it out into the air, but solidified in a tubelike shapes inside the earth. When endless time eroded away the softer materials around them, only the plugs remain (Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, a central feature of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is perhaps the most famous example).

I could almost hear Jim saying “WOW!” every few minutes as another came into view (one in the photo above from the internet). I tried to conjure him to see it with me and I hope it worked. Then I started thinking about my parents, both of whom died in their early sixties. How they would have loved the opportunities I have had to see the world, and how utterly happy they would be for me. Of course, even if they had lived much longer, they would both be well past the century mark now, and even under better circumstances they would have been unlikely to know how this part of my life has turned out, much less come share it with me.

I have now lived without them for more than half of my life and am a decade older than they lived to be. They were of a generation and an upbringing that made them not seek to be forever young, or care much about physical appearance. They both went gray, had little sense of fashion, and never tried to be cool. They were—well, parental. I liked their (mostly) easy company and I basked in their love and appreciation of me.

I didn’t appreciate them nearly enough in return. Recently I ran across an article in which the author asked a simple question: what did his parents want? If anyone reading this has parents who are still alive, it’s not too late to ask, but I am stuck having to guess. I am sure the first thing they both would say is “more time.” I wish they had that also, but what else?

What did they want for themselves? My guess is their answers would overlap in many ways but also diverge. I am certain they both wanted my mother not to have the crippling dual disabilities of ankyloid spondylitis and severely reduced lung capacity that kept her from doing many things. They both very clearly wanted a stable, loving family home. They also wanted (but rarely got) time away from that home— opportunities to travel, and (I assume) to escape responsibilities now and again.

My father was happiest in his intellectual work as a theoretical physicist .I think he loved disappearing into his thoughts, and though he was not in the least aloof toward my sister and me, he was not always there either, even when he was physically present. I don’t remember him playing any role in caring for my sister and me. He earned the money and made sure were were all okay. That was his role. I don’t remember him reading to us at bedtime, supervising a bath, or making sure we had lunch money. I remember one incident where my mother had apparently told him to clip my toenails (I wonder whether she had read him the riot act about maybe helping out once in a while). I wanted her to do it, of course, because the whole thing was so odd. The reason I remember it is that he did such a poor job that he drew blood from nipping the quick of one nail. And that was the end of that. I think he liked having his two daughters. I know he loved us dearly. I think, typical of the times, he just wanted to come and go from the mundane parts of parenthood.

I think my mother did too. And of course she couldn’t. What else was she to do in the 1950s and 60s? I think she did the best she could, but really wanted another life. I think she would have liked to have a career. I think she would like to come home to a house she hadn’t cleaned. I know she preferred dinners she hadn’t cooked, regardless of what they might be. I think she would have liked more chances for intellectual stimulation. I wonder if she ever indulged in a fantasy of running away and chucking it all. I suspect if she did, she felt guilty about even the thought. She shouldn’t have. It was a reasonable response to the dilemma of too little of life turning out the way she imagined when she got an MA in chemistry and was briefly a single woman working in a cutting-edge medical lab.

What did they want for me? They both wanted me to go as far as I could with my education. They were projecting graduate school for me when I was in junior high. I hated their expectations back then, but they understood me better than I did myself at that age. They wanted me not to settle down until I could be set for life with a foundation I had made for myself independent of a husband.

Did anyone else’s mother react to the engagement of her daughter with a desperate, pleading, “But why????” Yeah, my mom said that.

When I went on to get a Ph.D. and teach at university, they relaxed about the marriage thing working out, without really knowing how underneath the surface it wasn’t working out well at all. Though neither was alive when I divorced, they would have been pleased to know that I earned enough money that I didnt have to stay.

All that was a long time back. What would they want for me now? I think they would be thrilled with what I have done with my life. Although my mother believed I would write the Great American Novel, I suspect she would be pretty happy with my four lesser ones. I am sure they would be happy that my career kept alive the life of the mind. I imagine my cruise lecturing is beyond even their wildest imagination for the life their daughter might lead. I suspect they would be totally supportive of my present vagabond lifestyle, because when the details are stripped away, the prevailing theme of my life right now is choice. Choices they never had.

A line from Mary Oliver is my screen saver, to remind me to ask myself this question every time I open the case: “Tell me, what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Wild.

Precious.

Is that how my parents saw their time on this earth?

They were born into an era where it was so much harder to say, “no, I’m going to do this my way.” My father died before he retired. They never got to hold hands and jump into that wild and precious world of possibilities. I can picture their glee as they drove off in their camper to do who knows what for however long they wanted, or got on their first plane to a place on their bucket list. Except it didn’t happen. But it is happening for me, and I plan to do a better job in the future of remembering that everywhere I go, they travel with me, tucked in my heart.

A few days back I arrived in Barcelona after living out of a suitcase for seven weeks. The hotel had very nicely stored my cruise suitcase for me the entire time. Getting it back was the beginning of a very strange time as I adjust to the change in my life that these suitcases represent.

I thought two things, as I neared the end of my road trip. The first was that I wanted to take the handful of clothing I had worn day after day straight to a dumpster. The second was that I couldn’t wait to get into my other suitcase and get out something different to wear, something that didn’t have the dinge of hand washing and (I am being charitable here) a persistent hint of Eau de Laurel.

It wasn’t like that. I spent several days in Barcelona, staring from my bed at the second, larger suitcase over there in the corner of the room. I just didn’t want to deal with it. I kept wearing the old clothes, because they were available and familiar, and I think largely because I still felt like the person who wore those, not the person who would in the future wear what was inside the other bag.

When I got on board the ship and actually unpacked, I got a glimmering that I have another life that requires a different presentation of myself. Of course by now, the third day on board, have worn mostly things that were in that other suitcase, but it is still an odd, liminal state I feel myself in, as if the clothes I am wearing aren’t really mine. Right now as I type this, despite having loads of options, I am in pants and a top from the travel suitcase (washed by now in a real machine at least).

So what’s going on here? Why is this so different from what I predicted? I think part of it is that there are many subtle, unexpected differences between having and not having a permanent home. Then, my life switched back and forth from home to traveling. Now it switches from one form of impermanence to another. I guess I thought opening that suitcase would be like throwing open my closet door after a long trip and reveling in my options, and it wasn’t. I still live out of a suitcase. The only difference is that now it is a bigger, currently unpacked one.

But, more important, when I was traveling on my own, I was stripped down to a self who felt no qualms about going out with wet hair, and putting on what I wore yesterday because there it was, draped so conveniently on the chair. Now I have this interior monologue going on about what would be appropriate, what image I want to project. Now I have to manage expectations. Now other people matter. And maybe I’m just not all that enthusiastic about that.

And maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I brought forward something in myself through my solo journey that I want to keep front and center—the me that says what I wear is just not that important. And then again, it is. I have a role to play on the ship. How I look matters. So okay, I can play. I can do dress-up Laurel (see dinner photo below) and professional speaker Laurel, but I have a clearer sense now that they are projections, self-inventions. More than costumes but less than authenticity.

In Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, the protagonist, Isabel Archer, gets in an argument with Madame Merle, about whether clothes are the measure of a person. Her mentor says that clothes are very much a statement about who one is, but Isabel argues that clothes are simply things other people have designed that she wears according to social expectations and that they are not a measure of her as a person at all. I guess Madame Merle and Isabel are warring in my head right now. The battle of the suitcases has changed my thinking about how I present myself to the world, and though it is fine with me to do what is expected, I have a clearer sense of a me I really like who is hiding inside the me others see.

Tumultuous times in my head. I am almost six weeks into this travel adventure and it feels like a shakedown for my next chapter. Living on the move like this leads me every day to evaluate what still works for me, what I am done with, and what my priorities are. 

Yesterday was lovely in the ways a well chosen day in Europe is lovely. I took a day trip to Montreux and Vevey, two must-see spots on Lake Geneva (Lac Leman to locals).  My first reaction to the lakefront promenade in Montreux was “I want to stay here forever!”  Things didn’t stay perfect, and I won’t explain because that’s not the point here.  I then went the short distance to Vevey, and thought the same thing.  Indeed Charlie Chaplin thought exactly that and lived his last 25 years in a villa above the town. He is buried nearby. 

I hate to put this in writing, but I am noticing I am getting older. This was illustrated in Ljubljana a while back (it’s a blur now exactly how much time has passed), when after a full day tour, I practically fell out of the van from exhaustion and another younger couple on the tour went off to keep their day going with time in town. That used to be me. Today’s version of me is usually done by 4PM. In Montreux yesterday I planned to walk the 45 minutes to the castle of Chillon, but my hips and legs protested so loudly, (after 70 miles on foot in the last two weeks), that I turned around

I didn’t really know,  as I set out with enthusiasm yesterday morning, how drained I really am.  Add to this the sad news  yesterday that I have lost another age mate to cancer.  The day felt heavy with thoughts of her. Our relationship had been fraught with tension and conflict when we worked together decades ago now, and only resolved in the way it can when people have time to reflect and grow, appreciate and  reconnect.  I am sorry we didnt have longer to enjoy our genuine affection. We both became better people than we were then. 

Montreux and Vevey offered me all their charms, but I brought only part of myself to them yesterday. I think maybe I peaked ( no pun intended) with the Matterhorn, and now it is all denouement. But that’s not exactly right.  I’m feeling more of a zig, wnen I was zagging.  Now I need to figure out what that zig is calling me to do. 

When I decided to structure this trip around public transportation, I knew I would be staying in cities for the most part.  I used them as a base, and went out to see the natural beauty and smaller towns, but with the exception of Zermatt, since I left Montenegro it has been an urban experience overall.   And I’ll be blunt here: there is a sameness about cities, even charming European ones, more so now with global commercialism.  At this point I am feeling as if I don’t really need to see any more.  I know that may sound like a problem born of extreme privilege, and indeed I am very spoiled. That’s my reality, though, and thus my starting point in reevaluation.  

One of the pivotal insights in Hinduism, Samsara, is that we can’t get over cravings by ignoring them or willing them away.  We get over cravings by getting what we think we want, then discovering that we were wrong about what would make us truly happy. I have known for a long time that travel wouldn’t plug any holes in my psyche.  I wasn’t looking for thiat.  It was fun, and stimulating, providing new opportunities to learn and do new things. I still need life to be all that, but I recognize now that maybe I need to find new sources for continued reinvention

So was seven weeks on the road too long? Not at all. This has been an awesome, incredible six weeks, and even the disappointments have been instructive, but I won’t end up wishing it could have been longer. That is a first for me. I got exactly what I asked for, and  It had to be a bit more than I really wanted, because I couldn’t otherwise have had the insights that came with piling it on a little too thick.  

The good thing about being on my own is that insights can be acted upon. I have changed the plan once again for my last week, deciding that I really should visit Avignon and Perpignan when I am not tired of cities. It took a while to figure out how to make another plan work out because I had gotten my thinking locked in to using public transportation.  Then the simplest of thoughts occurred to me: I could rent a car and spend my remaining time in the countryside. What I really need now is a walk on a rural road, and vantage points  that are not rushing by as I travel by train or bus.  

So I cancelled everything for next week. Tomorrow, I take a train to Montpellier, where I will immediately rent a car and head out for a few days into the beautiful hill towns in that region of France. I really don’t know yet where exactly I will go, and I think I may try the experiment of not having a plan at all except to see and do what moves me as I go. I will slow down, rejuvenate, and then move on refreshed after a restorative dose of rural autumn and country air. 

Yes.  Sounds like a good way to keep the growth going.