Bali, Indonesia-The Grass Is Greener Where You Water it
Cruise Control: Bali
Los Angeles to Southampton. Somewhere between earthquakes, rice terraces, and the Hotel @nyware.
Shaken, Not Defeated
You cannot win an earthquake. But you can get odd—or even—by living well.
I remember the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California while I was on my way back from Japan. So when the news arrived from Japan in March 2011, I felt for my Nihon-jin tomodachi—my Japanese friends.
Lonely Planet Earth—the great symbol of everything solid—moves beneath your feet like that. One second creates an idea of insecurity that hours of Zen reflection never could.
An earthquake is a great equalizer: democracy in action, an equal-opportunity offender. In that instant, I tell myself I am going to survive—even if it kills me.
Here at the Hotel @nyware, we do not merely experience earthquakes. We generate them. In the spirit of Alan Watts, sometimes you have to go out of your mind to come to your senses.
I missed the Christchurch earthquake by roughly 500 miles and Japan by about 3,000. I began thinking California’s Big One might be next—and I was 8,000 miles away.
Screw Disneyland. I’m going to Singapore.
Bali: Rice, Rhythm, Perspective
The ship placed distance between me and the disaster, but not indifference. Bali offered beauty without pretending the rest of the world had stopped moving.
World cruising rearranges scale. A catastrophe can dominate every screen while the horizon remains calm. The ocean does not cancel the news. It gives you space to absorb it.
Did You Take Your Meditation?
Let me ’splain. Prayer is when you talk to God. Meditation is when you listen.
Once you recognise the pull of the ego mind—the never-ending desire for more—and understand how easy it is to become selfish, whatever appears in the monkey mind becomes workable.
When we fall, we can get up and start again, laughing at our humanness. We are human beings, not human doings. The best things in life are not things. They are people.
Read Eat, Play and ReifBackward Bearing: Mid-Life Chrysler, 2010
Travel by Proxy
Before the world cruise, the joke was already underway. Let us pretend, for purely rhetorical purposes, that I—an American male journalist—received a $200,000 book advance to find God and write about sensuality and spiritual growth.
I would call it Eat, Pray and Reif, also known as Drink, Play, F@#k: One Man’s Search for Everything in France, Macau, and Thailand. Would it not scream, quite blatantly, male mid-life crisis narrative?
I begin in France, eating quiche, driving around, taking power naps, and studying Franglais with Isabelle. Then comes a red-eye to Macau, followed by Thailand—the Land of Smiles—before I get my baht back to America.
That was the previous 24 months of my life, documented at the Hotel @nyware. By 2011, the journey had expanded from travel by proxy to a world cruise measured in oceans.
Cruise Control Is Not Control
A world cruise does not place the world at a safe distance. It reveals how connected every horizon is. Bali was beautiful. Japan was hurting. The ship kept moving. So did we.