Anna's Life and Mistakes

Why we travel

Recently, as my impending departure draws ever closer, the part of me which doubts has been screaming ever louder "Why are we doing this?!?" Not because I do not want to, but because it is too huge a commitment to make without knowing why I am doing it.

It is so easy to dismiss this query with an entire eulogy about how beautiful the world is, about the places I'll go, the people I'll meet, the experiences I'll have and even the possibilities for me to make some small difference in this world. But these are merely reasons why travel is rewarding, none of them are the actual reason why I want to, need to, travel.

It would be equally easy to propose that I am aiming to find happiness, or a purpose in life, or some other personal attainment. But these are merely side effects of the travelling process, none of them are the reason why I must travel either.

And then on my trawling through the internet one day, I found a man called Pico Iyer, and his piece entitled "Why we travel". Go, read it. It is worth the time. Better to go and read that piece than finish reading this blog post!

The man, coincidentally writes with a genius like nothing (literally nothing) I have ever read. You can read more of his fabulous work here.

Now this piece is 12 years old, and yes, some of it does perhaps feel slightly dated, and some of it is perhaps so personal to Iyer that it will not be particularly universal. But the core message resonates clearly through the piece and makes perfect sense to me.

I have long believed that love is the driving force behind those aspects of life which make us human, the things that take us mentally, physically and existentially beyond the constraints of our evolution. This is not some fluffy naive philosophy, I am referring to love as a driving force for conflict, hate and greed as much as I am to a force behind happiness, selflessness and relationships. But good or bad, love is ultimately the reason why, or at least the reason for our conscious mind.

So why travel? Because to travel is to love. To love in a way which a static life could never fully elicit from me.

As Iyer says...

"And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end."

The Olympics is in town!

Something tells me Sally is not impressed!

It makes an excellent bird swatter!

Today is the start of the 2012 Olympics, this year I am lucky enough to be present in the host country... but unlucky enough not to get any tickets! So playing about with the torch my Mum carried is probably about as close to the Olympics as I am going to get!

To match the inferno of life

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Blogging future

Now that my 24th birthday has been and gone, and it is now approximately 150 days until I am due to leave the UK, the future seems to be rolling in at an alarming and unstoppable rate.

There is lots to be done before the waves hit the shore, not least of which is deciding and implementing my chosen blogging solution for my travels.

My original aim was that this Blogger space would be my learning zone. Practice for free when it doesn't matter, gain the habit of writing. Then when it was time to leave, migrate the entire blog over to a Wordpress hosting on my own domain to create something which was more permanent and potentially monetisable.

While I still definitely want to go ahead with my plan to set up another blog to document my travels on, I am unsure whether I want to merge it with this one or create two separate places for me to write. This blog has been a cathartic experience for me and I don't want to lose the capacity to express the things which are very important to me and yet not directly related to my travels. But yet I am also not certain whether I necessarily want to express all of these things in a space which is open to all my family, friends and co-workers from my past, present and future have open access to.

Of course, anyone who really wants to could access both if they wanted to, but I am wondering whether maintaining two blogs, one very publically and one without any publicising, would create a more comfortable emotional position for myself...

...But on the other hand, when my life is a whirlwind of travel and adventure, would I have the time to maintain two blogs? And even if did, should I? Didn't I say that one of the things I have learnt from my blogging experience is that I should expose more of who I really am in everyday life to achieve a greater congruency in identity?

Kaleidoscopic!

"At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities."

~Jean Houston

The big answer

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Yes it's a dog video

It is. It's a dog video, and it is 3 minutes long. Apologies, I genuinely do understand that this is utterly boring to basically everybody.

But for me, she is the love of my life, and I am completely ok with that. And today is my birthday, so today is Sally-dog video day. Yay! Happy Birthday me!

(anyone who is not me is therefore absolved from the responsibility of watching it!)

Alarming trickery

In my last biphasic sleeping update, I talked about how hard I was finding keeping up with my biphasic schedule due to the increased daylight hours of summertime. Well I am pleased to find that a strategy as simple as putting my alarm on the other side of the room has most certainly helped me get back on track. I think my hold on my new sleep cycle is still somewhat tenuous, but until I start becoming willing to just lie down on the floor and go back to sleep this tactic seems to be working.

Another more welcome side effect I have noticed is that my body seems to have come to expect a 6 hour total sleep when I have a monophasic night. I rarely sleep for more than 7 hours and usually bounce awake soon after six hours, regardless of what time I actually went to bed. This is a world away from how my sleep-greedy spoilt brat of a body used to behave, so I am actually quite pleased with this development.

Nemesis Mondays

Some days at work, not the busy days, or the difficult days, but the monotonous days, I wonder why. Why I ever thought it was worth it to work this long before I left on my travels...

Now I don't doubt that it is helpful, safer, sensible even to have a financial safety net for any kind of travelling. Money to fix a broken van, or a broken leg, or to buy a flight home. Obviously not everyone has this safety net, but personally I feel it is worth saving long enough until you have this.

I also don't doubt that it is also preferable to have enough money that you aren't living hand-to-mouth each day. Money available so that you never go hungry. Again, not everyone who travels has this, but for me, this is worth saving for.

But beyond that, where is the line?

If I leave work at the end of the year with £50 000 in my bank account, maybe I can make this last for 6 - 8 years depending on how things go. I will have bought myself 8 easy years for 4 wasted years of working. Does that sound like a good deal? I'm not so sure.

In 8 years time, I will be 31 and (I hope) my travels will be far from over. I will need to find a new way of providing for myself.

Yes those 8 easy years will be nice, they will be brilliant. But they will end. And will they be worth the 4 wasted years? I'm not so sure.

I think I have may have crossed the line. Perhaps it is something I should have considered sooner.

Olympimania

I am no fan of the shameless corporate promotion and unnecessary expense (Did someone say recession? No? Oh well that's ok then...do carry on spending all our money) associated with a major sporting event like the Olympics, and yes I am just bitter and twisted because I didn't get tickets. But last week my Mum was one of only 8000 people who got to carry the Olympic torch on it's journey around the country, and fortunately I was able to swallow my cynicism just long enough to get my picture taken...

Message to my teenage self

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Too many years were wasted learning simply to love and accept myself, I look back at my teenage years now and this makes me very sad.

Two weeks from today I will be 24, my greatest wish is that I will never look back on my twenties as a time when I failed to live as voraciously and thankfully as I could have done.

Here is the world

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Biphasia vs. summertime

Sally... having no problem taking her nap!

One month after the conclusion of my biphasic sleeping experiment, I thought everything was going great. I felt healthy, refreshed and my sleep patterns seemed easy and natural. Then something went wrong. And that something was summer.

Suddenly, going to sleep at 10.00 pm became really really difficult because it is so light outside. Then naps taken any later than 10.00 pm became impossible to get up from. And finally, I have developed the ability to hit the alarm and go back to sleep without actually waking up at all.

Bad times.

So instead of napping some days, and sleeping 6 hours monophasically other days, I have ended up with a combination of oversleeping as I miss waking up from nap time and intentional 6 hour monophasic nights. Now I'm not sure whether it is the imbalance of sleep length or whether a 6 hour monophasic pattern is less sustainable longer term than a 6 hour biphasic pattern as I suspected previously, but I do know that I feel exhausted!

Really bad times.

But I am desperate to continue having more hours in my day to play with, so I'm going to try and push through this bad phase back into biphasia.

First thing I'm trying is putting my alarm at the other end of the room next to the light switch so I have to get up and turn on the lights just to silence the alarm!

Collision

Why is it so easy for me to learn from experience, yet so hard to let go of the past?

It is irrational to assume that the behavioural outcome will be the same from different people who happen to find themselves in a similar situation. I know this, I have studied this, I understand this. And yet I cannot help but feel...

...the pain of betrayal so sharply, as if the expected outcome has already occurred this time around.

...the paralysing grief from the dreading of broken rules, that reminds me how easily that grief can tear the very fibres of my being apart. Rules that haven't even been established this time, that aren't even there to be broken. Rules that I don't ever want to make again.

...the anger at the thought that yet again I risk it being one rule for me, and another rule for him.

...the hatred of myself for feeling pain, sadness and anger directed at someone based on nothing they have done, but simply because I have learnt from something that somebody else did.

...the disappointment that the scars of the past are able to mark the present, long after the old injury is forgiven and forgotten.

...the fear. Usually when I identify the source of my mental discomfort I feel satisfied that I am then in a position to address it, but with this I am not so sure.

For when past and present worlds collide, who can survive?

Sally star

Me and my Sally...at our agility training club's show this year... just doing our thing.

This was our second to last ever show, and this is one aspect of England I will really miss!

There is life

Life is precious these days. Maybe it's due to the promise of imminent travel adventures creeping ever closer, combined with the sweetness of summer and the fact that existing suddenly feels so damned good. But life suddenly feels immensely fragile and tremendously important.

I seem to be driving everywhere at least 10 miles per hour slower than I was just six months ago. I am so close to everything I have been working for all my adult life that I am determined that nothing will stop me from reaching it. It is an interesting detachment from my usually happily embodied state in that I feel so desperate to preserve my body, to trap the life force inside it. I am constantly aware of my existence and overcome by gratitude for it.

Lying in the blue dark I feel the heartbeat of the other, smooth, even, calm.

Ba-dum, ba-dum, you are here.

I listen to the sound of their breathing, never quite to the rhythm of my own.

In, out, I am here.

I keep still, until the sensations on my skin merge and I can no longer determine where I end and the other begins.

We are here. Nothing else matters.

What if I can't?

www.postsecret.com

Change does not suit me. This is probably my biggest character flaw, because change is, after all, the only constant. I try to be one step ahead of my inability to handle change, to push myself into experiencing it in full, even when I would rather turn away. I am all too aware that my future plan involves a lifetime of change, the hardest part of which will be the impact it has on my relationships with those around me.

As I wrote in August last year:

"Yes it will be heartbreaking, yes it will leave me feeling numb over and over and over again, but this is the life I choose."

But honestly, right now, that scares me. What if I can't handle the change? What if I can't stand letting go once, never mind endlessly letting go? What if it stops me from reaching out to others? What if it just isn't worth it?

I may not be able to answer all my questions, but I do know it is worth it. Worth it a hundred thousand times over, and I know why. But I am still terrified.

And so I cling to the moment, to the here and now. The ever-present reminder of how finite every moment with those around me is grounds me in the enjoyment and full participation in the present.

Perhaps that is actually the gift which makes the fear and the pain worthwhile, not the lifestyle or the travel or the people or the places. The reminder that nothing is forever transforms the present into everything.

Highest mountain in England...done

On Sunday I climbed Scafell Pike, aka the highest mountain in England. Here are a few photos...

And I would have a photo of me at the extremely windy top... if my Mum hadn't put her thumb over the lense. Oh well, guess I'll just have to go back then!

Sweet hypocrisy

I have made no secret to myself of the fact that in my search for love I desire a little more freedom and a little less limitation than perhaps my culture prescribes that I should have.

I believed in my desires. I did the research, I did the maths, I theorised about the morality and the logistics and the emotions.

And while it all seemed so simple when I considered how I would react to my man's desire for his own freedoms, for his own limitless love, I never really reflected on how I would react to my own.

So I was surprised by the fact that in the cold light of day, what my emotional self wanted was far from the conclusions of my rationalising and theories. Freedom? Sickening. A love without boundaries? Terrifying.

Is it possible that just because I felt mentally ready to leap away from the cultural preconceptions of what love should be, that didn't mean this could be achieved in any other way than by taking tiny baby steps?

Maybe.

Is it possible that I don't need a relationship without boundaries, I just need the freedom to make my choices for myself?

Perhaps.

Is it possible that all my theories are wrong, and that I actually have no idea what I really want?

Probably.

Is it possible that all the theories in the world cannot come close to providing me with the understanding I need to face relationships with conviction and compassion, and it is only through experience that I can come close to finding what really works?

Definitely.

But what I have learnt is that although relationship theories can be made alone, they must be applied with someone else. And only through application can either person know what themselves or the other person truly feels.

Falling in love always all over again

As always... when summer finally wings its blessed way around to this dank little island... I fall head over heels back in love with life again. Hot sunny days are my inspiration, my muse, again, and again, and yet again today.