Around the World in 169 Days

Touching foot in nineteen different countries scattered over three continents in the last six months, it is good to be back in my favorite corner of the world. While Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg may have done something similar in eighty, even with more than twice that time I often felt like I was moving too quickly and I can't help daydreaming about a similar trip in the future, but next time with an open-ended return date. I arrived in Edmonton yesterday after a direct flight out of London - a little less than nine hours in the air - and hung out with friends before crashing at night after more than twenty-five hours without sleep.

Besides seeing a few sights and gathering a few stories, what I have noticed in six months are the changes back here: Relationships have grown stronger or dissolved altogether, people have switched jobs and moved locations and of course the snow has left. All that, and I am just a guy with longer hair and a full passport. A friend said to me while I was traveling to soak it all in and not to consider what I might be missing if I was still back home; that the mundane is all that was going on. While the day-to-day life of settled lives might be considered mundane, there is a magic to that sort of living as well, though I think it is easier to be lulled into considering the days rather unimportant. Getting into a new city or tasting some new food or deciphering a foreign language are all things that kept me keyed into living in the moment and soaking up everything that was right in front of me, and as I now head back into routine (as unsustainable as experiencing something new everyday is) I am going to try to maintain the sort of focus on the immediate. Even if it is something I am intimately familiar with.

While I can't point to any epiphanies that have struck me to my core or experiences over the last six months that have fundamentally altered the way I try to live my life, I am not surprised. I figured out a while back that it is only through reflection that I personally come to anything resembling certainty about pivotal life moments, and it will be in hindsight over the coming months (and not to be melodramatic, but maybe years) that I will be able to look back and reflect on how my trip around the world contributed to who I am.

This got a little deep. Thanks for reading along.