My parents have asked me many times to come home and I haven’t? Why haven’t I returned back to Canada after traveling for more than 5 years. I guess it’s a matter of pers[ective but after my second full year on the road I realized that if I wen’t back I’d have to start from the beginning in terms of work and just a life.
I knew when I left Toronto, a city I had both grown to love and hate that I was not in a good place. I left because my life was and shambles, I lived in shame of everything I was not. I compared myself to everyone and in every way possible I came up short.
It made me pack everything up and leave, travel became addicting but more than that it opened me up to new people and expereinces that I never thought was possible. Still the question is why keep going?
The reason is more than it would be hard to get a job when I return, maybe it’s as simple as I have goals I need to reach before I can get a chance to return. I know what it would mean to go back to my parents but I also know that I am never going to be who they want me to be.
In some ways that great in other ways its scary no matter what I know I don’t want what everyone else has. I knew that I couldn’t be that right now, that I could but wouldn’t want it and I had to accept that a normal life was not going to be fore me today or tomorrow or well into the future.
Being God of a Universe of your creation (even if no one will ever read it)
What I seek now is inspiration to tell a story, in a world of my own creation one that started in December 2013 when I has having a hard time when I just got to India.
I imagined a world that I wanted to explore, I’ve grown that concept of a world into something that spans hundreds of pages of content not in the form of a book, but a book on a world.
In that science fiction universe I imagined how travel would work, what would our universe me like if the rules I put in place came to pass. I take scientific news and add those elements to that world to help flesh it out and give it gravity when I finally find the story.
Can I like off this idea? The short answer is no, the concept has no form outside the word document that contains those words. It means nothing to anyone but me. I come at it from a gamer’s angle but with a writer’s heart. A writer afraid to explore what this world means and how it can possibly be and how it could become a story.
Holding off is Standing Still and that can’t continue
I started doing this world building for fun but now it’s on my mind daily, outside of muay thai and traveling it dominates my thoughts even if I still have yet to settle on a story. Every time I see a new update on space travel, on what exoplanets have been discovered, or what lay at the foundation of physics I end up opening my document to add new sections, expand on older ones and revise others.
I want to write daily but I have problems coming up with where to begin when I have a universe of possibilities just within what I have already created. I think back to all my travels, using their names as the basis for characters. I am currently looking to cultures to see how these new places will fear, so that they can live and breath on the page in a way that feels real and lived in not just generic and artifical.
Right now I think of how can put myself into the mix, what part of me will carry on in the characters of the world. It all comes back to who I choose to be, what I want and how do I make it happen. I don’t know what the road ahead will be like.
Travel has taught me so much, revealled the best and worst within me, shown me that I can fight, that I can win more than I can loose and that I can be humble in the win and brutally self hating in the lose.
I write because…
I write words instead of giving them because it is easier for me to get my point across but at the same time it is hard to stop writing once I begin. I often think to much or take too much time before I get started as the last 5 years of crafting this world is proof of.
I am a traveler, I have had the chance to fight in the muay thai ring and I will get there again when I am able and I am a writer. I seek grand stories to tell, I have covered events, done copy but I write for me. I want to tell stories that have yet to be told, that are built on foundations that go back to before we had the written word when stories were passed down carved into walls of given to the wind and whispered among the small tribes of man.
I can’t wait for inspiration to hit I have to start writing, to get a system in place and I can’t use the fact that I am traveling as an excuse because if I have a few hours then I can read to learn and then write to bring forth the story that seeks to be felt, because if it can be felt, if it offers lessons that express the human condition and can live in the heart of more than just me then my mission will be accomplished and I will have summited by mountain.