Thoughtful Travel is In

Fear is for folks who don’t get out much

Instant Gratification Takes To Long

After spending 8 months a year for the last 10 years living out of a suitcase, it is easy to reflect on the value of thoughtful travel. I call it "Taking Yourself With You". There is no such thing as work-life-vacation balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. One rarely falls in love with people without being equally attracted to what is interestingly wrong with them.

Travel, at its best is creative destruction. In the wisdom of the moment,the power of new  language, food and culture and people are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be lived.

The whole exercise has to be reconciliation.Lowering, removing or shattering the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate we human beings, one from another. It's not so much about being understood as understanding.

The Hunt For Happy- is the longing for repetition.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling  our stories from the same facts.  Pleasure is not happiness but the  joy I have extracted  from trips depends  more on the mindset I travel with  than on the destination I  travel to.  I don 't want to tell anyone where they ought to travel, but only how and why.

My dream-I haven’t been everywhere, but it is on my list, reveals  I  never quite get 'over' this travel-thing : it's all still in there somewhere. You have to be like someone to envy them-when you can't relate to somebody, you can’t 't envy them. Not too many people are doing what I’m doing. There is a randomness of #winning and losing, not any justice to it or divine right..

People make my experience vital-That's the mark of a good trip.  I never heard a travel agent ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we want to go.

Instead of bringing back 3000 refrigerator magnets, I  return from my trips  with a collection of small but life-enhancing/ extending thoughts.

Empathy and Sympathy-A Big Distinction

For instance, Empathy: I see someone zoom past me in a tricked out  Lotus   today—He  is  not  greedy or flashy  but  “incredibly vulnerable and in need of love”  I know because I drove one in Monaco. I was that guy.

At home we don't usually encounter our true and best  selves. 

The Things You Own End Up Owning You---but beds last longer than marriages

For instance, Sympathy: I see bitterness, the silent disease (mostly) of  domestic relationships take its toll---the habits and confinement of the ordinary, commuter  world where, once home, the furniture insists that we cannot change because it doesn't and debt keeps us tethered  and stuck to the mundane and profound.I feel that pain, and have an infinite(compassionate) smile for anyone who is grinding it out  because I embrace(d) that ennui  and burn(ed) it as fuel for my travels.  That  resignation is  like a spot on your shirt that never comes out-So Don't  just change your mind, change your shirt.

Rule of thumb is if I am not  embarrassed enough  by who I was and what I did  last year, I  probably not learning enough!

Some Nostalgia- Pedaling Thoughts

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

In Copenhagen, I went for a bike ride in the center  of the city. …In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a yellow building  and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there.

Yet, it seems I may best be able to inhabit a place where I am not  faced with the additional challenge of having to be there all the time.

Born in NY, Neurons that wire together fire together. Considering how much inner  "nomad" is in each of us, in adulthood I gave myself permission to  LEAVE ASAP, and  imaginatively re-create(d) my  ID  in line with my  true allegiances of  a place noted for second chances, Venice Beach, California.