Time is something that we all think about, of course. But I wonder how similar or dissimilar our experiences truly are of time slipping past. For some, it goes very quickly, for others too slowly. Sometimes we are five ages at once and two decades stuffed into a single dream or a memory that triggers unexpected avalanches of wistfulness, deja vu, longing, shame, regret, or disbelief that we are here and no longer there.
For me, traveling stretches this notion even more. The need to experience the newness of a place for the first time. The freshness stays until one day you realize it’s been a year and a half since the first time seeing the Baltic Sea. Or five years since randomly hopping on a train to Poland. Or even six year since riding in a rickshaw in Bangladesh.
The Baltic Sea as seen from the Curonian Spit in Lithuania near the Russian border.
This week, I will hopefully negotiate a new life abroad with my employer who happens to have an office in Dublin. A transfer to Ireland, with the promise of a vastly reduced salary and another life begun in the green fields of a country I’ve never visited before sounds appealing. Especially after being so isolated during the pandemic. One of the things I look forward to, that feeling of motion. So this entails selling everything and settling anew in a city like Dublin or Cork or Galway. Perhaps even somewhere less know than those places even. As there are no real limitations on WHERE I can move to in Ireland, as long as it’s in the Ireland that isn’t part of the Brexit UK.
I’ve been reading a book by Tim Robinson, Listening to The Wind about a cartographer’s experience of Connemara, a National Park outside of Galway. Sadly, I find out after a quick Google search that Robinson passed away in April of 2020 from Covid-19. He was 85.
In the beginning of the book he writes:
“A writing may aspire to be rich enough in reverberatory internal connections to house the sound of the past as well as echoes of immediate experience, but it is also intensely interested in its own structure, which it must preserve from the overwhelming multiplicity of reality.”
And
“I concentrate on just three factors whose influences permeate the structures of everyday life here: the sound of the past, the language we breathe, and our frontage onto the natural world.“
This time around, this won’t be an amusing vacation. Or a trip for work, like when I went to Bangladesh and was stored at a sad motel in the diplomatic district where I ate a thin gruel each day for breakfast and was not allowed anywhere outside except for the roof. Yes, I will be doing work there, but this is entirely my choice and at my own request to go there. This is a move that is meant to be something to give me more perspective on my own writing, to respark my enthusiasm for remaining hungry for the world, and to keep engaging with that part of me that believes I’m not really growing older. Surely, this is not a mid-life crisis because if it were, then I’ve had about fifteen others as well. Well, granted I didn’t move to another continent…
Though I’ve been to England and Scotland, Ireland is still a bit of a mystery to me. Practical questions present themselves: taxes, new salary, the cost of living in Dublin or even Cork. The loneliness and sense of culture shock that will surely manifest within the few months after my arrival. Most of my friends are settled. Have families, spouses, homes, children, even grandchildren now. And I’m about to do the opposite. Sell the accumulations of a life at the tail end of a pandemic to fly over six thousand miles away and begin again.
Thought I would start a blog again to keep some sort of record. My last blog died an untimely death after keeping it for fourteen years when I lost my credit card while traveling in Thailand. Ironically, it was most likely lost at an Irish bar on Patong Beach where I was distracted by the unsettling event of watching four Russians unfairly gang up to beat a Thai tuk tuk driver half to death over a fare dispute. They were drunk and this would not be the last unsettling encounter with Russians on the trip. But in my haste to leave the bar and get distance from the incident, I left my card behind. And a month later, after I had switched to a new card, the blog had been summarily canceled and deleted by the hosting company with no way to recover the many years of writing I had put into it.
So six years later, I’m trying again. Also, keeping my photos here while adding others might help give me a new sense of continuity. Though while I was on that journey in SE Asia, I did keep a small (and separate) travel blog, which can be found here. Onward, as they say.