I don’t want to travel anymore.  I just want to be home.

A series of events have unfolded at warp speed over the past few years. Starting in 2004 when I got struck by a taxi and broke my leg, I turned my life of stressful routine into a life of adventure, accumulating dreams and fulfilling them with an aggressive enthusiasm. I’ve taken my happiness seriously when it should have been taken with lightness. I have made life’s leisures into a life. But I don’t want it anymore. I’ve proven you can make travel your life and, to myself, I have proven that it can be just as lonely as it can be fulfilling. And right now, I’m exhausted.

I’ve overcome hardships with as strong a positive attitude as possible, wondering when I would hit rock bottom. It never happened. I just kept going – floating for fear of drowning, or “rolling with the punches” as one friend put it. Before Jet Set Zero came along I had already let my stubborn enthusiasm 1) guide me to Europe, 2) volunteer in Kenya and become embedded in rural Kenyan politics, 3) produce my documentary A Chance for Peace (with zero prior experience) immediately following Kenya’s post-election violence, and lastly, it was all topped off with my apartment burning down rendering me homeless and broke as I struggled to finished school. Why am I tell you all this? Because I could pretend that this life of travel is all sunshine and freedom, but it isn’t. The reality – since that is what we are here to share – is that it is also extremely taxing and I don’t want to keep it up anymore for me or for anyone. If anything it is a job I love, not the entirety of a life I want to live. Not for me. Not anymore. There but be a balance.

I’m so thankful for Jet Set Zero and for everyone I’ve met along the way since I first started walking again after breaking my leg those years ago. I’m eager to carry out all the mental, emotional, and spiritual acrobatics I have tumbled through, but I can’t do that in flight. I need roots. I’ve been uplifted by so many experiences and have been empowered to continue traveling as I see so many people becoming inspired by my trips. More will come, undoubtedly, but for now I have to stop.

Today I write you still stuck in India and I don’t know how and when I will be home. I consider my stay here one last lesson that’s telling me its time to go back to California and build my home and life. Again. Hopefully this one wont burn down like the last one. The night I watched it all burn I said to myself, “Destruction gives way to creation.” It’s time to lay the foundation. I can worry about adventure – and appreciate it more – once my roots are firmly planted.

Happy holidays, ladies and vagabonds. See ya when I see ya. It’s been hella real.

PS: I’m working hard to get onwards and upwards, but if anyone would like to make an offering of Frequent Flier Miles in exchange for some grade-A karma, I would not object. So holler. Peace and love, y’all.

I am a fraud.

I’ve espoused to others what I consider my wisdoms, my “lessons learned from a life of travel” and I have been deluded by my own ignorance.

I used to say that my outlook on life was based on a keen awareness of the fragility of life, but instead of nurturing it, I have strangled it, tying a wire around the neck of the world and squeezing out its wisdom, join, and pain. So don’t listen to my “words of wisdom” because I know nothing. If anything, I can tell you that wisdom is not something to be taught or learned. It is a consequence of life. It doesn’t lie in your will to achieve your goals or your desire to “be a better person”, nor is it stamped in your passport, as I mistakenly thought.

Achievement and desire have been my downfall. In the West, it’s conditioned by society that time is limited, so hurry up, work hard, and do “right”. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m tired of that tension. What some call “the American dream” has taken me further away from enjoying the reality of each moment, and into a  future where the only thing that is certain is a constant start of want and reach. My drive to be something extraordinary, I now realize, is totally ordinary and not noble at all. And the strength of my desires has produced just as much stress and suffering as life-changing moments. But life is always naturally in flux, it doesn’t need me to hurry it along. In short, my mind needs rest from want.

I have said before that the more I see the less I know. On JS0: Thailand, I wont be surprised if I am, at least in part, portrayed as “the spiritual one”, but my search is coming to a close. I’m learning that the best thing I can do for my spirit is to let it breathe, not smother my mind is philosophy, theology, and history. All these years of travel and circumstantial transience have taught me that there are no answers and there is no “me”. I know nothing and this supposed-former-wisdom-junkie would happily rather be your fool.

That is my confession. Little melodramatic maybe, but sometimes it comes with the territory.

Photo by: Tyler Batson

As I mentioned before, this isn’t a competition. I don’t want to be a success or a failure. I want to just be. I want to live. There is no measure of success or failure, of superior or inferior by which I live; there is only living. Fully. Always. If only I could say the same for everyone else.

Life is indifferent to arrangements. My plans are of no concern to my path. Daily, we cross paths with hundreds if not thousands of people with their own arrangements, their own lives. Anyone who thinks they can control their days and create a happiness with all their strict planning within this beautiful chaos we all live in, is in for an awakening. As our planets magnetic fields, energies, and communication technologies draw us further outward and inward, it becomes more and more evident that we all need to let go. Stop planning, stop carrying the burden of our pain and others’ pains, stop letting fear guide our decisions, stop comparing yourself to others and stop trying to manage life or just survive it. You could be living! Out loud, without the symptoms of insecurity, defense mechanisms, and lonliness that a life half-lived brings.

You can say you understand these words, but as a wise woman once asked me: “But are you happy?”

This is no superficial understanding I am living. I carry around no mask, make no effort to hide or pretend, and I don’t claim to have the answers, so it’s frustrating to find people like this in my life. I don’t want to inherit their pain, their negative energy, or their insecurities, whether they are doing it consciously or unconsciously. I can tell you right now, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I don’t want or need to go back. No one does and I’m not going to feed into it.

Arrangements or no arrangements, I’m finding that there are some basic life skills that are missing, some that are so basic that their lack just makes life all that more painful and difficult for others. I have not often been exposed to these kinds of people, so this is very much a learning process for me, too. But one thing we all knew was that this is supposed to be a group endeavor. Every decision of the individual affects the whole. Was that not clear at the onset? Everyone was expected to fulfill certain tasks. Was there some miscommunication? Life happens, I know this, but when faced with such enormous opportunity how can you just throw it away? My answer cuts to the core: fear and insecurity. Why do I mention this? Because the core elements of life are universal and this can be a lesson not just for me, or for those around me, but for everyone.

For now I am working on releasing thought. I am finding the shine that has been dimmed over the past month or so. I’m finding it in new friends, new places, new moments of light and spontaneity, new languages, and new paths I’m crossing every day. And it feels good. My mind is slowly quieting, that lump in my throat is dissipating, and I’m living as I want to live, not by the influence of others’ decisions and experiences.

Some arrive with their arrangements already etched in their being. I don’t live that way. Some are still learning things I have learned already. Respectfully, I acknowledge that we are all on our own path. It’s chaotic, it’s beautiful, and it is thriving. Moreover, I know love. I am loved and I can see the totality of life not just its fragments. This is a gift that has become my daily practice and I can only be grateful for this bounty of a life behind me, in front of me, and right here and now. So in spite of it all, when that wise woman asks me again if I’m happy, I can answer unequivocally, yes.

Don’t: Pack your backpack the day of your flight with the assumption that you’ll be able to carry it. If you buy a bright green backpack and can barely move when it’s on your back, you’ll look like a turtle waddling forlornly through the airport.

Do: Test the weight of your bag in advance and start exercising so you’ll be able to pick it up.

Don’t: Get all your vaccinations in one sitting. Your arm will be red, bruised and swollen and people on the street will treat you like a DV victim.

Do: Take advantage of the extra hospitality you receive if you do wind up looking like a DV victim.

Finding hospitality at Dirty Dick's

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Lesson number one when getting keys made anywhere in the world is, or rather should be:

Try out your keys before you lock yourself out of your damn apartment!

This is a lesson we ended up learning the hard way here in Quito a few days ago. We went down to the local key maker at his multi purpose shack. This is the person who besides making keys is also the local parking attendant, convenience store owner, guy who adds minutes on your prepaid cell phone, sells envelopes, peanuts, loose cigarettes, color or black and white copies, faxes, cellphone cases, candy and takes passport size pictures. He does it all from a shack that is only marginally larger than a portapotty. Long story short, we left our original keys in our house while we went out grocery shopping at the local market and when we came back were surprised to find our keys didn’t work! We hoped our doorman would let us in but alas even he didn’t have a key, the upside is our place is tighter than Fort Knox. We ended up calling our landlady, taking a cab across town and getting a working set of keys. Lesson learned.

As I’m trying to figure out what to pack for the “eternal springtime” of Quito (what does that even mean?), the biggest challenge is finding the balance between packing light and packing to live somewhere for 3 months.

I’m a light packer by nature. Okay maybe not by nature, but by the nurture of lessons learned the hard way. Between losing, misplacing, or being robbed of my fair share of things while traveling, my load has been lightened in more ways than one. Thus when traveling through Latin America and Southeast Asia, all I carried was a gray Jansport backpack. Not the massive backpacker-style packs that are the size of a golden retriever.  A regular school backpack. When I had to carry my backpack for long distances (imagine, no taxis!) I was quite the happy camper compared to my aching, sweaty companions who were struggling under the weight of half their wardrobe.

Lesson #1: Pack only what you can carry on your back while running at a full sprint to catch the last (or only) bus of the day.

I’ve seen a lot of people bring things of sentimental value with them when they travel. Their favorite necklace, favorite pair of shoes, forty favorite shirts. Big mistake. When their vintage Pumas go missing after they’ve taken them off to step inside a temple, or they find themselves Tiffany heart-less after squeezing through a large crowd, they’re devastated. It may sound pessimistic, but as I’m packing I’m asking myself whether I’d be okay if these things didn’t make it home with me.

Lesson #2: Never pack anything you would be sad to lose.  In other words, pack only what you wouldn’t miss.

Half of the fun of living in a new place is integrating yourself into your adopted country. Not only does haggling for a hand-woven shirt in a nearby market help support local enterprise, but dressing like the locals do shows that you’re willing to adapt to their culture.

As a traveler, assimilating into the culture will open doors you can’t wait to walk through, such as being invited to meet someone’s family and seeing what local life really is.  And afterward, that embroidered belt or woven poncho will evoke more treasured memories than that glow-in-the-dark shotglass you were considering.

Lesson #3: Be ready to blend.