When I think back at my travels, Thailand is the first place I return to because it was the first place I landed and a place I returned to again and again across my wandering. It was awe, mystery and wonder all wrapped up in that sense of adventure and what comes next. It was an epic start to a period of my life that I will never forget or regret. Looking back at that time I was so earnest even though I wasn’t wide eyed youth in body I was so in mind and experience. I am still figuring out who I am now but then I was excited about just seeing the world for the first time outside my form of normality.
that is what travel is, no matter who you are or where you go or experience, it is about getting outside your normal to see, feel and touch a difference part of the world. As a visitor and tourist you get a chance to see a different part of the world, its alien nature from your normality. That is something that the pandemic has taken away from everyone who wants to travel and who has traveled in the past.
Today as we are all still relatively sheltered in place from the pandemic, the ease that we once traveled with is only missed because of the complexity and difficulty that travel is today. I will always look back on my era of wandering with awe and hope that we can return to a version of it, even if it will be different after the pandemic. It will never be what it was and that isn’t bad, that’s just our reality. Tourism is about getting a chance to experience different parts of the world that are outside our own from of reference. To step foot in a different place and realize that for all that is different about us, we will always share more than what separates us.
That the variance of the human experience and the human condition is what make life worth living. It is how we will as much as it is who we choose to spend it with as much as anything else. There are no absolutes in life but the constant flow of change amid the ticking of the clock that make up how we experience the life we have been blessed with by our parents and our creator be it given by God, Gods or no one. That doesn’t really matter, all that matters is what we each choose to do with it.
I have no illusions for what that means, all I can do be walk forward, based on the love of those that have given me this opportunity and what i choose to do with that. I am not sure where I am going but I hope I can be worth their love and effort. That I can live a life worth living, and tell a story worth telling even if it is only to myself and those willing to give my voice a chance, that’s all any of us can really do. To the travels we have yet to take and to those we will met along the way.