Talia and I sit here in a café in North central Vietnam. I
have a small cold and we haven’t been able to see any sights or do anything
interesting because of it.
I haven’t blogged in a while and while there are many
reasons why, I decided to write a little today and share my thoughts.
A lot of the people we speak to don’t really know what we
are doing here, in Asia. We heard from Talia’s brother at Christmas that some
people seem to think that we are on an Indiana Jones style adventure which,
while untrue, would be quite pleasant. No, we aren’t running through caves with
huge boulders rolling behind us. We have been to a few tribal villages but they
haven’t chased us or tried to eat or sacrifice us…
So what have we been doing? Well… I have no idea. I have no
clue. One of the reasons I haven’t written in a while is because I have been
doing a little soul searching, trying to find what it is that I am doing.
I am in a very small community of people (just me and my
girlfriend, about as small as a community can get) and though we share
everything, I spend a lot of time in my solitary shell. Just thinking to myself
about … well….. myself.
What am I doing? Am I doing more than the other average
traveler? Is that what I want to do? But most importantly, how does it affect
ME? So while most people we meet are doing something similar to us, though
usually on shorter schedules and quite often more touristic, is that me too?
Am I just an ecologically negative force on my surroundings,
taking the same photographs of the same stuff as everyone else? Sometimes I wonder
if the money I saved for this trip could have been spent on a nice new Audi, or
a deposit for a nice two bedroom apartment overlooking suburbia.
No.
I’m doing this for me.
I am travelling and seeing and doing for the sake of myself
and how it will affect me as a person.
All of the time I spend reflecting and thinking about my
past, all of the mistakes I made and the trouble I caused. All of the apologies
I owe and mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. While I’m sure that because I spend so
much time here in my solitary shell thinking about my past while living my
present, everything I think is expanded and grows to a gargantuan psychological
force that I must over-power and come out the other side a better person.
I saw a movie recently, a Dreamworks
cartoon, but the parallels suffice. The movie was “Bee Movie” and in one of the
first scenes there are two bees conversing over their summer experiences. One
bee says he was glad he spent the summer travelling around the bee hive, the
other bee says “yeah, you really came back different.”
Different?! Will anyone ever comment on my difference when I
return to the world? Will others complement my “differences” when I return, the
differences in my expectations, personality, wants, intelligence, etc. Will I
be different to the one who made all of those mistakes? Or has all of this just
been a dream where when I wake up I still don’t talk to certain people because
of a mistake I made in my past that in their eyes I am still to be held
accountable for?
Will I be able to sit at the adult table at the next family
wedding or will I once again be pushed to play kids games at the kids table
because I didn’t grow up and get a real job yet, because I haven’t paid into my
pension fund like some other people in my life who chose successful work over
world travel?
I guess the closest analogy I can make is if I see myself as
a shining light, and as I pass through a pane of glass, how do I come out the
other side? Will I come out the same as before, just with a fistful of
photographs and a boastful ego? Perhaps I come out the other side a completely
different colour, as if the glass is stained. But has it stained me for the
better or the worse?
I look around and picture Vietnam, in fact all of South East
Asia, or even East Asia, with it’s rice paddies and conical straw hats, the
stilted houses, and everything that all of this could ever entail. I see all of
this as two things, one being amazing experiences, experiences unique to me
which I get to enjoy the way I want. And secondly as my pane of glass. All of this is my shot at redemption. My
chance to mentally right my own wrongs on my own terms and come to realize my
own faults so I can better myself for the good of primarily myself and
secondarily the people around me, especially those close to me.
Who am I? I’m a work in progress.
