These days, when I get the time I delve back into my history, of my trip to Europe, and remember what I learned and what I experienced. It was an amazing time, but also confusing. I’m trying to be transparent sharing both sides of the coin, not just the side that embraces the fantasy and fulfillment of travel. The fun is a big piece, but the story is so dense when you embrace it all.
I am going through my journals and finding things to post and share. There iss a lot, so going slowly piece by piece is the way.
Here is a random excerpt, with a few edits which I put inside these things […]
Its vulnerable to reread it, and it was a time of when I was questioning, why I was in an amazing place but feeling confused, incomplete. Feel free to read and see if it inspires anything in you. Thanks..
It just was a new setting to feel the old thing.
Dec 2016,
[ The story takes place in Almunecar, a small beach town in the south of Spain where I volunteered with a family for a week. The family let me stay in their townhouse in the city afterwords for a few nights to myself. Really lucky and generous of them!]
I journal my life. Here I an on the water, just had a great coffee eggs and bread. [Wandered around that day and found a cute breakfast place right on the water, which was empty. Had a table right on the sand, looked very photogenic] What a lucky soul I carry. So much abundance within me.
To feel like a child doesn’t need toys but needs love. [Oh Adam, always seeking these love injected moments. Right after them a sense of incompleteness…what’s next feeling!]
How to make sense of my life. I get this and I’m not fully happy, and even here I feel slightly incomplete. As if it’s beautiful, but something is still missing. Maybe I do go back home and write. Or I write here. [My Europe trip was supposed to be intertwined with a writing of my experience, but I found it really easy to ‘forget’ that and just travel. That tended to rumble in my subconscious every now and then, such as moments like this!] Who knows. I’m blessed, I feel, to experience those outer luxuries. This is an outer luxury. I look at those working out or sitting on the beach. I question if that should be me, or if that would make this moment better, something else before it, as oppose to just this. [Something more then being a tourist]
[I didnt have the discipline, courage, or confidence to just sit in one city and write. I was always chasing inspiration, and never addressing the fact that there were days or weeks going by without results. I couldent own up and stop the fruitless momentum, I kept looking for new places and new ideas. Hopefully to inspire me. To ‘channel’ itself through me. It was all nice ideas, but looking back, they resulted in nothing in those moments. Just journals which took years to get reread. Was I settling for less? Or doing the best I could at the time? It was a guilt trip in someways, “I should be writing, doing this or that…”]
I too am trying to understand my life. Feeling close, [Close to understanding what I was going through, I guess?] not there, not complete, but closer. It wasn’t this restaurants duty to complete me, but to sit with me, and say, we can be here Adam, who says we can’t. [How delicate I was at times, being emotional and putting my happiness into eggs and toast, and wondering why I still wanted more. Yet also, the scenery, context, and story was magical. Funny thing.] We can sit and adore this moment. It’s splendor. It’s uniqueness. I am here for myself. But others, I do miss them. I can atleast say, gees, I enjoyed this. I gave myself this and felt the outcome , I didn’t say it was bad or good. I guess I feel like I didn’t even eat, like I could eat it again…I didn’t eat for the feeling, as much as for a checklist [That’s a funny feeling, when you eat and barely remember or feel like you did]. It’s odd, this feeling. It’s a feeling of saying this is building a life, but it’s not in a way. This seems like something I let go of when I move to my next place. I no longer am dying for this. I have it, this is that. Spain, sun, beach, I have all that. Again; what was it? Different then I imagined. Wasn’t the life saver?
[This moment was a cycle. I many times in this trip chased someplace or something, had it, and was caught offgaurd at how I felt afterwords. It dumbfounded me at times…What was missing? I was so set that the place and thing, the material experience of being there, that that was what I was seeking. But it wasn’t what I was finding…]
But it’s magnificent. My favourite breakfast, the wide open ocean. So what’s missing? Idunno…a sense of deserving it. I can say just wanting it is deserving it. But I feel like I’m missing out the social aspect of life. Someone to share? A sense of accomplishment? I am journaling this. [But not owning it. I am renting this experience. It will be gone. The illusion that the setting creates the story. I (or humanity) overfocus on the setting, where the story takes place, not seeing that the storyline is always the same peaks and valleys, in a different location. I think it would have been social had I transformed that moment into sharable writing, but I journaled it, lived it, and never shared it. It didn’t even rise to the surface and make its way to humanity. And that was the challenge. The inner desire to share but on the outside it was invisible to humanity. It was purposeless to others. It was just there for me. The inner conflict of having a mission, and then finding yourself suddenly forgetting what it was…]
The setting is apart of the story, but is not the story. And many dream of this setting, or speak of this setting, but the setting isn’t the story. The setting is just where we experience emotions. Chasing pretty settings. The problem is not lack of setting, but a loss of meaning, of purpose…a search for a story. [A world of pretty settings and no stories, that is the tragedy.] It’s better then where I was, but again those were setting problems, chasing settings. Chasing sun. Chasing new. Chasing highs. Chasing a different life then the security of my past life. Perhaps both are right, and people are upset they arnt in balance…wishing they had more of mine, and me wishing I had a bit more of there’s. Community, stability, friends, a job, accomplishment…
I don’t do this to have a better life, as if traveling is a magic pill for that, or cause I was a victim for delaying or postponing this for so long.
I do this to follow my path, see my ideas, test my theories about life.
[I don’t write this cause I think its something everyone faces, but because it really illusioned and surprised me. Its my admission. If others relate great]
[Below is a photo I took of this place. Funny to be here now, in 2019 in a café, rereading all this as a story, a distant past experience. In the moment, it was so real, heavy, light, lucky, strange, everything, and slight nothings. A big ying and yang moment. Incredible how it was so momentary. A lasting experience which faded so quick. Its ironic. And I think a theme I will see and uncover more in my searching through my old journals! I hope you enjoyed this post, and I look forward to more about my trip being shared!]
Living in Free Fall 