Saturday, December 30, 2017

Oxford, unabridged

In Irakleio, I bade farewell to Crete, to Greece, to all of Southern Europe. What ought I to expect of the UK? I feared that my encounters would become more pedestrian, less mythic, more disappointing. By the same token, I understood that the UK has its own rich and unique history.

If this thought process seems naive or insulting, consider that for my whole trip, I had drifted in cultural and geographic waters I’d never seen or tasted before. (Tasted?! Who tastes seawater? It’s a metaphor, but I hope you see how new this all was to me.) Back home, I could tell the difference between a raging storm and a tiny ripple. So far in my modern Odyssey, I had had to rely on the wisdom and predictions of others to educate me on what was important and what was unremarkable (although I honestly found everything remarkable), what was beneficial and what was dangerous. As fate steered me toward the UK, I began to fear that this territory would be like, or at least feel like, home. I worried that I would lose my spirit of exploration.

Thames River, looking south. Taken near Christ Church Meadow

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

I have time

Last time - wow, it has been a long while, hasn’t it - I spoke of fear, a feeling of encroachment, the sense that I was shrinking and reverting to a lesser form of myself. I determined to forge ahead in spite of my uncertainty about what exact path to take, with the hope that simply moving might help me to unearth some useful observations to live by and share with you. Alas, I did not proceed to do much with that fortitude.

However, it is worth it to try again, and to keep on trying again. In my next blog, I will finally return to chronicling my summer trip. I have time for this. I didn’t have time before, but I do now.

No, I don’t believe that. Or, I don’t mean that. “I don’t have time” (or “I do have time”) is a very common Western phrase, and in the last three months I have quietly said it to myself whenever the thought of toiling on this blog - or on travel as a vocation - has crossed my mind. The claim tidily summarizes a slew of feelings, desires, and material conditions but it is also absurdly, almost offensively inaccurate. To say “I didn’t have time” doesn’t really communicate anything at all, except to confirm some very basic data that you could see with your own eyes - that I was not writing for a while.

I mean something entirely apart from what I say, and part of traveling well in life is to understand how what I think or say differs from reality, and why it differs...or to at least know that what I say or think often differs from reality and also influences the shape of reality as I experience it. Further, in the spirit of my “Flip the Pyramid” blog, I want to be respectful of you who are taking time to read. I want to speak, and mean, with care. To get to what I really mean, I need to take you on a side quest.