Why I Travel

As I walk through the security line at the airport, I notice the guy in front of me, athletic, all button-down shirt and casual cargo pants, with black thick-frame glasses that turn colors as you move in and out of the light. He  carries nothing through security but a black, almost perfectly square cooler. I figure he must have some affliction and he needs his meds kept cold (I know from experience). But appearances and our own biases can be (and very often are) deceiving. 

He pulls a plastic bag out of the cooler, with three (3) frozen solid bottles of Deer Park water. He puts them in the TSA tray and leaves the cooler open. The TSA agent warns the screening guy that “frozen water, coming up!” and moves on to help me with my bag. The athletic guy moves along through the people scanner, chewing gum, completely non-chalant and well-possessed, not even blinking. No explanation. No fuss. Like he owns the world. 

The guy behind me says to the TSA guy: “Excuse me. Umm...What is that, exactly? You are allowed to transport water bottles through TSA if the bottles are frozen?” The TSA guy goes “Yes, sir! That’s right!” The guy behind me says “Well, I don’t agree with it, but wow! Just wow!”

In my mind, I say: “Sorry, buddy, your authority nor opinion is needed here. Move along.” But yes, I am wowed too. 

After I clear security, the first thing I do is google “can you take frozen water bottles through security?” and lo and behold, yes, you can! This just completely baffled me. I have been traveling consistently by plane since 1998 - for those hard of math, that is 27 years. I have counted 10 one-way airline trips (some of them with multiple flights) this year alone and I have never known of such a rule. This was a lesson ... 

As I continue my journey, I come to my gate and we’re ready to board. They tell us, as they often do, nowadays, that the plane is full and to make sure we board quickly and sit down immediately, not to block the aisles, you know ... the usual. Then, they call people by “zones” (some airlines board by groups, some by zones). They call First Class, then Zone 1, then Zone 2. We all wait. And wait. And not one person boards in Zone 1, nor 2. I have never seen such a thing. Again, ever, in all my travels are whole “zones” completely empty with “a full flight”. The gate agent seems totally OK with this, but we’re all looking around like “are they still at the bar or what?”. I am telling myself “this is going to be a trip of firsts, I guess?”. 

After I board (with my zone - I can’t recall what it was, but I am at the end of the darn plane again, zone maybe 7 or some such unlucky number; as a matter of fact, let’s not be ungrateful - zone “never” might be unlucky; the fact that I am on a plane at all is a plus), and after all the people are in their seats, the pilot walks all the way to where I am sitting and hands over a goodie bag to a lucky passenger on account that they are a “first-time flyer”. No, not with this airline but ever. Not sure how they know this? Not sure how or if they verify this, but there it is ... I am shocked. How has someone nowadays, especially in the very large America where people are so spread apart from their families, living in this huge country, never flown? This person is not a toddler either. It’s a mature man with a head full of white hair. They are totally shocked and embarrassed and they accept the bag with a chuckle and applause follows. 

Then, to make it even more unusual, the pilot walks to two rows in front of the man he just congratulated, on the other side of the aisle, and hands over a second goodie bag to another first-time passenger completely unrelated to the first one. Now, I am thinking I must be in a dream: there is not one, but two such rare specimens on my flight. What??? You live and you learn, as the cliche goes. 

As we’re preparing to take off, they make their little announcements and there is a new one for me: they tell us that video taking is “absolutely prohibited”, and this is not an “airline policy, but an FAA policy”. And I pause. Well, if video taping is prohibited, then how come TikTok (at least this is what I hear, since I am lucky enough to not be tethered with such a curse as a TikTok account) full of videos of flight attendants being slapped by or slapping passengers all over the world? Or did the policy come in response to such videos and is new? I am not videoing but I am taking pictures, so I figured I am not in trouble, but my goodness, frozen water first, no videos second, airline rules are moving fast, even for this mildly-frequent flyer... 

As I leave the plane on my arrival to the other end of my trip, at my final destination of Orlando, FL (a destination, I feel, that should require a passport, if you’re coming from anywhere else in the US, even), I head over to the ground transportation area to call an Uber so I can head to my hotel. I was a late adopter of Uber - have been using it for about 3 years - but I have used it on two continents and tried using it on a third one, but the Gods of the travel agency protected me from using it in Africa. Long story, for another entry. 

A cheerful gentleman called Jose arrives and I see a new disclaimer on my Uber app - that Jose is “recording this trip”. Hmm ... Video forbidden on the plane, but obviously running by default in the car transportation. I do not like surprises all that much, but this trip seemed to have it all. 

These are just a few examples from my most recent trip. And this is all to say that one of the main reasons I travel (other than to get where my life takes me) is to learn. Travel is almost a free add-on or bonus of new lessons about how you should behave in the world, how you should carry yourself among other humans. It teaches you how prepared you are to just be a human firing on all your cylinders, and being the best you can be among your peers. It builds tolerance and empathy - which are becoming somewhat endangered nowadays - but this new world we live in, try as it may, I would never, as long as there is breath in my body, want to lose them. 

Travel allows me to make my thoughts, my whole being stop chattering and opinioning and just listen and watch. Assess and propose corrections in my own path. Or not. Travel keeps my senses alert. There are so many things we must be present for in travel - you cannot space out and get lost in your doom-scroll of Instagram when the TSA agent, or a passport control agent demands answers from you. You are forced to connect with the person in front of you and think. Although I like to think of myself as a minimalist when it comes to consuming social media, I still hate when precious minutes go to nothing but mindless scrolling. Travel is not mindless. It is focused, character-building (remember that 20th century concept anyone?) presence. If you don’t have that (presence) while you travel, your very life might be at stake. 

I travel  because I need new energy, from the outer world, to replenish and recharge my own depleted body which becomes stagnant after a while just being enclosed in myself. 

My sister and I grew up “in the mountains”, we call it. We were city girls by birth - born and raised in the second-largest (by population) city in Romania - but for about 3 months every year we would live with our distant relatives in the Northern Carpathian Mountains, with no running water in the house, working tireless every day for our food which came from cows, sheep, chickens, or foraging for wild berries and mushrooms in the woods. This is how we learned physical, manual labor. Life on the land was very different from life in the city. In the city, we learned how to be pedestrians and how to ride with civility in a public transport vehicle. In the mountains, we learned how to listen to nature, and know dangers unknown to the city dweller - like the call of a wolf, or the scratch of a mouse in the attic eating through corn, or getting splinters out of our soft, city hands when we split wood in the woodshed behind the house to make fires every night to heat our rooms in the wood-burning stoves or in our water heater boiler every week for our shower.

Travel reminds me  a bit of those times - when we were forced to live in a completely new environment and we were absolutely forced to develop a new set of skills that would not have been developed otherwise. 

I travel because I know my perception of the world is biased. And I need hard proof for the truth. 

I travel because I am consumed by wanting to know the truth. Is the world really as bleak as the media and social sites claim? Are people as angry and evil? Are they truly hating one another? Travel shows you a different picture of that. Or certifies it for you. But you will never know for sure unless it becomes your experience. 

I travel for food and for new-ness. For taking myself outside of my cocoon of safety and forcing myself to react, to feel, to truly know, and to truly form an opinion. I travel for the surprise of it and its shock value as much as I travel to realize that I had the weirdness and diversity of the world within my soul all along. But I just didn’t know it. 

Travel forces you to think quickly and outside the box. And make do with what’s in front of you. 

Travel forces you to look deeply into your soul and assess - do you like what you see? Here, there are alternatives, would you like to reconsider? I never speak to myself more honestly than when I am traveling - because it forces me to be present and to stay awake and aware for the simple reason to be safe. It also forces me to be awake because everything seems to be new. I cherish getting lessons from everything that I open myself up for. 

I travel because travel leads me to books. And books lead me to travel. And books have been the one, only, constant in my entire life that has never disappointed. Boyd Varty’s Cathedral of the Wild led me to Londolozi which changed my life. Then, Londolozi led me to The Elephant Whisperer which enriched my understanding of human kindness and nature kindness and nature intelligence as well. And the examples are many from so many of my other travels: the innumerable books I read about English and American authors growing up that took me to England and later America where I found my soul, eventually. 

Travel brought me to wonders like the South African wild this year - and what a quantum leap that was! I emerged transformed only with a fraction of my old self from the African bush. It tapped into senses I didn’t know I had. Our over-technological suburban world dims those senses, or, in some cases, completely exterminates them. But going out of our comfort zone (something that is intrinsic to travel) allows our minds and sometimes even our bodies, to develop abilities that otherwise lay dormant or are in danger of becoming extinct because of our lack of need to use them. When you are called to react to things you don’t encounter every day - like a leopard on the hunt, or a pride of 9 lions completely wild, with no circus director to tame them in sight, or a river full of crocs opening their huge jowls at you, or even foods you have never seen but are called upon out of respect to try - you cannot help but learn new lessons and new abilities that you might not have thought you had. 

I turned 50 this year. I read a lot of thoughts on what and who you’re supposed to be when you turn 50 or when you reach your mid-life. Some people are told they are old. Some people fight this concept and feel young or do meaningful things to feel young. Because I live inside this 50 year old body, I feel just like I did when I was 10 or 20. 50 seems to me to be just a number. 

For me, the one thing I want to be or to do going forward (which has not changed just because my ID says I am not a different age), the only thing that I hope will define me in my next decade and beyond and always is the desire to continuously learn. To avidly and voraciously keep learning, with every day, with every trip, with every person or any other being that I encounter. Keep learning and becoming and changing and morphing into who I will eventually leave as my finished “product” on this planet, once my time is up in this realm. 

I cannot think how I would be able to learn without traveling. Just like I have said many times before, stopping traveling is like stopping to breathe for me. I felt like I needed a reminder to reassess why I do it - I do it to remain whole and to keep becoming. Becoming is my now and my future. That is all ... And that is all that matters ... 

One of the places that stays with me, 28 years later: the thermal pools of Pamukkale (or “Cotton Castle”) in South-Western Turkey - I took this picture after I climbed this mountain barefoot with hot streams under my feet on a 100F degree day in August 1997. 

Drifting into the New Year

At the close of 2021 and the dawn of 2022, we decided it was high time for us to escape our four walls. True to our tradition of heading North and West in the summer and South and East in the winter, we more or less randomly picked the Georgia Golden Isles to migrate to. Just like the birds. 

I am writing this piece in the middle of a winter storm, with freezing rain, wind and temps below 30F and it’s exactly the kind of weather we ran away from right before the new year clocked in. 

I am not sure where I came up with “Georgia isles”, truly. I was dreaming of going back to Kiawah island, in South Carolina - something I have been meaning to go back to for a while. But there were not a lot of AirBnB options open for the New Year and not a lot of places to eat too-too near-by. So, I went more South with my searches and the maps landed me in Georgia. 

It was our first time in the islands of Georgia and we had zero expectations. We knew we would want to take in some of the beaches - not to lay out, but to walk and shoot. We knew there had to be some birds to watch and we wanted good, fresh seafood and a reason to sit around on a fish-smelling patio and sip a cold drink. 

And those were what the Georgia isles delivered and more ... 

There is no way to properly describe the haunting beauty of the Spanish moss draping over hundred-year old live oaks. It’s something that must be experienced to understand. It has a lot to do with the chill, or the skin-crawling feeling given by watching a horror movie and less with the quiet, majestic beauty of a landscape. Nevertheless, it is as mysteriously beautiful as it is scary. 

I believe every Georgia coastal town (Savannah included) is flooded by these beauties, but I could be wrong. I have just personally not been in Eastern Georgia where they were absent. 

They haunted us everywhere and framed the adventures we were about to have. 

The first day, we woke up in our AirBnB condo in St. Simons Island, on a marsh flooded with sunlight. There was not one egret under our balcony, but a whole farm of them. Kingfishers, herons, cranes, ducks and many other water fowl that we could not even identify. My husband said “wow! It feels like we’re in Africa or something.” - a little bit wetter than that, I’d say, but the golden water vegetation, the minimalistic trees and the birds everywhere, the wide-open sky were all there ... We felt transported. Our little house in North Carolina, of which we have been growing way too bored, was eons behind us ...

We had breakfast reservations on Jekyll Island, at Eighty Ocean Kitchen and Bar. We ate outside, under the palm trees and by the pool. We were the only people on the patio. There were people eating inside and we could not understand why: the weather was amazing, maybe 75F, partially cloudy and breezy. Just beautiful. Not to mention: pandemic! Why would you want to be inside?! 

You have to pay a toll to go to Jekyll Island, which was news to us, so having done that, we decided to do as much as we could on Jekyll Island before we'd get out again and pursue the adventures on our own island of St. Simons. 

After breakfast, we went to Driftwood Beach which was on our “to do” list. Whatever the google tells you that Driftwood Beach is ... is incorrect. If you’re ever in these parts, the $8 toll is 100% worth it just for this beach alone. Just like the name alludes to it: it is a beach full of driftwood. But not just some twigs and branches of driftwood like you see in the decor of many beachy cabins. No, ma’am! It’s a whole forest of driftwood: entire trees just “shipwrecked” on the beach, thrown around, laying on their side, some still standing, dry roots over wet sand, leafless for what it seems like ages, just bracing the ocean; the wind; the hurricanes; life. 

The enormous trees of Driftwood Beach - Jekyll Island, GA

You feel small and unimportant in the whole scheme of things. If the elements can throw around trees the size of buildings like these, what can they do to you?! No control ... There is so much freedom in driftwood - not knowing where it will land, in a different place every day, moved by the water ... There is so much about chance and history that they whisper ... Again, so much mystery. 

Turkey vulture at Driftwood Beach

After the beach, we drove around Jekyll Island in search of Tupelo Trail. We drove by the Horton House, a historic tabby house built in the 18th century by Major William Horton who was believed to be the first resident of the island. He also was the first person (from what is known) to ever brew beer in Georgia and his “brewery” still stands in ruins on the same land as the house. Learning about the Horton House, we also learned about the rich history of the island which was captured from The Spanish in the early to mid 18th century by British troops stationed at Fort Frederica. In case you are wondering, a tabby house means it was built from a mix of burned oyster shells mixed with sand, water, ash, and other shells. 

The "farm" of egrets behind our condo - Sea Palms Resort, St. Simons Island, GA

The entrance to Jekyll Island with the Sidney Lanier bridge in the background

Once we found our trail, we realized that we just stepped into almost another climate, or even another part of the planet: the landscape surely changed drastically between the open, wet-and-dry, windy beach and the trail: Horton Pond at the mouth of the trail was a quiet little heaven for ducks, turtles and alligators. The trail itself looped around the park through a forest of live oaks draped in Spanish moss and resurrection ferns and littered with palmettos and exotic blooms. We were now thinking we were transported to Hawaii in the middle of the rain forest. It was hot and humid. Sticky humid and almost blistering hot. This was December 31, 2021. Definitely the warmest December I have ever lived. 

Tupelo Trail on Horton Pond - Jekyll Island, GA

We stopped by Tortuga Jack’s on the island for some drinks and some snacks before we headed out. Jekyll’s Island overdid itself in beauty and surprises! 

We headed towards the St. Simons Lighthouse on - where else but - St. Simons Island. We took the tour of the keeper’s house and visited the museum, but it was simply too hot to climb all the 129 steps to the top of the lighthouse. We resigned ourselves to walk around the park that leads to the St. Simons pier and take in the gorgeous sunset. The last one of 2021. All the worries and “muck” of 2021 seemed to drown into the ocean with that sun ...

Last sunset of 2021

St. Simons Lighthouse

St. Simons Pier

As we were watching the sun drowning into the ocean, I called my parents in Romania around their midnight, to wish them welcome into 2022 although we were still 7 hours away from it. I wished them well watching that sunset - it was like speaking with them on the other side of the precipice and the sun’s brightest lava was bridging us - on either side of The Atlantic, in two different years; present and future to us ... present and past to them ... 

Later that night we had a delicious seafood dinner at Coastal Kitchen and Bar and we rang the new year in our room because all restaurants and bars closed before midnight. Go figure! 

The following day, we woke up to a brand new year! Oh, the possibilities and hopes! The dreams and prayers we were sending out into the world! 

Somewhat augurally, we had breakfast at the Echo Restaurant at The King and Prince Resort on St. Simons island. The sound and the birds were echoing premonitions of the new year, twined with those of the one we had just left behind ... but we could not make up the voices. We could only hear the sound ... When we stepped on to the patio at Echo, we were on the beach again. Although there was no beach to be seen! I had never seen the ocean clad in so much thick fog! I have always wondered when watching maritime movies how they make it so foggy on the ocean sometimes because having lived on The Atlantic in my time, I had never seen fog that thick. Well, it was there, on St. Simons Island on the first day of 2022, I can promise you that! The ocean was silenced and seemed far, far away, although we knew it was right there, within a few hundred yards really ... Puppies and children ran all around ... We sat under an umbrella and enjoyed our breakfast. Or rather lunch because they were done serving breakfast ... All the restaurants seemed to have trouble keeping up with what meal they were serving when and with what reservations were made and for what dining room (inside, outside, covered patio?). They were all very good but it took them a minute to find their bearings with every guest. 

The foggy beach at The Echo - St. Simons Island, GA

We walked briefly around the beach after breakfast and around the resort and the streets in St. Simons. Everything felt very much like we were in Charleston, SC or Savannah - Southern coastal history at its best. Live oaks and beautiful, well-manicured palm trees were greeting us at every corner, majestic villas wrapped-up in history and dramas untold. There is a strange mix of Southern and Spanish architecture in these islands, perhaps hailing back from the times when Georgia was deemed as “Debatable Land” - not too sure whether it belonged to Spain or the British Empire. That debate was settled in 1742, when the soldiers of Fort Frederica fought The Spanish under colonel Ogelthorpe and decided once and for all that the land belonged to The Empire  ...

After breakfast, we headed towards the Christ Church Frederica, an Episcopal church, one of the oldest in the state, originally established in the 18th century, destroyed during the Civil War and rebuilt right after that. A walk through the cemetery on the grounds reveals the long history of these parts, old families with elaborate plots. Makes you wonder where they all came from, who they were and what secrets they took with them on the other side of this dirt. 

Christ Church Frederica - St. Simons Island, GA

The cemetery on the grounds of the church

The day was once again getting hot. We headed next to Redfern Village, a shopping and restaurant kind of neighborhood, to browse the book offerings at Righton Books and cool off with a latte at Jittery Joe’s while getting some energy back while savoring one of their oatmeal cookies. 

Cheeky and inviting sidewalk sign at Righton Books

Over our New Year’s Eve dinner at Coastal Kitchen the night before, a couple sitting by our table on the patio started chatting with us (the magic of dogs! They had a cute little Australian shepherd terrified of the fireworks who came and spoke with us first) and told us that while we were on the island, we must go to Sea Island (Resort) and listen to the bagpiper at sunset. They promised a once in a lifetime experience. Sea Island is a gated (with a guard) golf club and resort which was built on the grounds of many establishments that existed between the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century (as explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Island,_Georgia). Today, it is on the PGA tour and although it is breathtaking, it smells a bit of dirty money and too much pomp for our taste. Or at least that was my first impression, mostly judging by the self-entitled crowd that roams the place with a self-important swagger, drink in hand and superior grin to boot. Maybe I am wrong. 

Even if you can’t get into the exclusive resort, it is worth driving down to Sea Island to see the Avenue of the Oaks - the street that leads to the resort, lined, like loyal soldiers, forever en garde, by old live oaks draped in the now ubiquitous Spanish moss ... The low branches and the hairy moss are quite the spectacle in the breeze of the island ... 

The Avenue of the Oaks at Sea Island Resort, St. Simons Island, GA

Our dinner “friends” told us the “secret passcode” to get in: “Just tell them you’re there to see the bagpiper. They’ll let you right on through.” And they did. We were not too sure where everything was and where the piper might be playing, but a very friendly concierge lady directed us to the back patio which opens up in the driving range, framed by palms and palmetto trees. The bagpiper started playing around 5 PM and he was to play for an hour. He walked up and down the golf cart path in front of the back patio and played sombre tunes. The sunset was around 5.30 PM. We listened in awe to the beautiful sound of this instrument but it was far from the serene experience we were promised. People were talking very loudly on the back porch, shouting out orders, mothers, babysitting their children while the husbands were loading up their golf gear in the overpriced vehicles, were running around trying to keep an eye on the little ones, watching as they were getting ready to hit their first golf ball and hurriedly posting every move to their social media accounts ...

Ruins, oaks and moss at Sea Island Resort

The bagpiper at dusk

We left the porch and the too-busy-to-take-in driving range area and found a more solitary “crowd”, much quieter, by the infinity pool on the shores of the ocean, still within earshot of the bagpiper. There, we waited for another glorious sunset - the first one of the year 2022. We were silent as we both probably made a mental plan or said our quiet prayers for what the new year might be bringing onto our lives.  

The infinity pool and the first sunset of 2022 at Sea Island Resort - St. Simons Island, GA

On our last morning on St. Simons Island, January 2, 2022, we woke up at high tide, with our condo marsh flooded by the tide water. It no longer looked like Africa. It very much resembled Kiawah Island ... the trees were half-way buried in water and the birds were happy, restless and hunting for fish. 

 

 

The marshes behind out condo on our last day on the island

View of our condo from the marshes in the back

I threw on a shirt and some jeans and I had to walk behind our condo and take some last pictures to remember this place by. There was no noise, not a sound, other than of fish occasionally leaping up from the waters, or of water fowl letting each other know they are home. 

Birds in the marshes behind our condo

On the way back, with my husband driving, I kept thinking of all the things we had learned, about The South, its history, about what kind of people live in these parts and were buried in that solemnly quiet graveyard, about all the old year’s remains that we buried in the ocean with that last sunset and about the new slate ahead of us - a new year, with new dreams, hopes, promises ... 

My thoughts were drifting in and out of my mind, oscillating between the old and the new; the old I had left behind, the new that was wrapped up in the fog of the unknown new year in front of me. Will it be better? Harder? More rewarding? Or a let down, not worthy of new year’s resolutions or even prayers? An uprooted tree, at the mercy of torrents knows no direction. It just follows the drift until one day, it might just find a friendly shore to rest on ... forever ... 

Happy new year, all! Wishing you all safe shores! 

Sunrise to a new day behind our condo right as we were getting ready to head back home. Click on the picture to view the entire album from this trip.

The Big Lesson

I have been writing this post in my head just about a thousand times, with only a smidgen of exaggeration ... And I realized that I better let it flow and stop overthinking it, so here it goes ... 

For the last team meeting of the year, my boss asked us to come up with one accomplishment, our biggest for 2021. One. And you know what? I racked my brains for days to come up with one. Not because I’ve had so many, mind you, that I had trouble choosing, but just because I am afraid 2021 was one of those just ... OK years. I never believe that any year is forgettable. I’ve always believed that every year is good and bad and new and old and it’s all its own “thing”, just like people. You can’t just pick one person to be interesting - we all are for different reasons ... But in the “personal accomplishments” department, 2021 seems to be lacking. For me. 

I personally don’t think of accomplishments per se, either ... I string them together in my head around milestone days (birthdays, anniversaries, deaths, year-ends) right alongside the losses and the not-so-glamorous events. But, I usually count the “new” and the “different”, the lessons in my years and this year, just like all the others, had those, as well. But again, if I were to compare it with other years of my past, it would not wow me. It would not stand out. And it would not beckon me to repeat it - although I never want to relive things, either, even when they are great ones. What is the point, when life has so much more new-ness in store for us that’s worth trying at least once?! 

This year felt a little bit like this: 2020 was a bizarre, surreal, fiction-like year that brought about end-of-the-world-like fears in me, and everyone around me, family, friends, or complete strangers. There were true, palpable events that could literally have made “the whole sh*thouse go up in flames”. 2020 was one of those years (probably the first for me, in my 46 years of life) where my whole world, my frame of reference of the world, was completely blown up and exploded to smithereens. And I knew that the smithereens would never come back together just the way they were before,  they were never to make the same exact whole, albeit cracked, as before 2020 struck midnight on January 1st. Last year we were all trying to regain our balance and to clear the ashes and smoke out of our eyes before we barely realized what the heck just happened to us - our lives, our routines, our understanding of the world was completely shattered ... 

And then, after 366 days of that (it was also a leap year, remember?!), I told myself (and I am sure I had company, too): “All right, 2021. Be (dare I say?!)  normal! Let’s figure out how to get back to before the Big Interruption of 2020, shall we?! 2021 came with the promise of new vaccines that would restore our freedom. We’ll then open up the world. We’ll get rid of the Dictator in Charge in the White House. The world will be freer, fresher, will hit Reset and start back up. Shakier, changed, a new kind of “new”, but start back up. We hope.” So, for 365 days (almost) of 2021, that’s what we did: we kinda waited for that “normal” to come back ... We waited. And hoped ... and we’re still waiting and hoping ... Or at least I am. 

Truth is: 2021 did not end up being much different than 2020 ... Still another year of proving “unprecedented” to be a painful cliche ... Still a year of “not normal”, a year of fear, of waiting, of hatred, of haves and have-nots, of one day competing with the next in bad news and drama, no matter what news channel you follow ... Turns out that 2020 did not teach us much. Yet, anyway. We kinda wanted 2021 to reset us to our “old selves” but what it instead did, at least for me, is made me believe that there is no “old self” to go back to ... The scars and pain of 2020 morphed me, and us, into these new earthlings and will now have to find a new path, a new life, a new routine for whatever the future might bring to us ... 

I am sure the generations that survived the wars could relate to this: they could never again be the people they were before the wars began ... They could only move on as the transformed people they became during the trauma and the tragedies they witnessed during those wars ... And so are we today.

The world has evolved (or really just changed) and our “war methods” might be different today than in the beginning of the 20th century but they are still wars - direct affronts to our systems of value, of integrity, of being ... Disruptions to a perceived and comfortable order that we had established for ourselves and called it our own ... 

2021 was the Year of the Big Lesson, I would call it, or the Year of the Big Reset: the lesson was that there is no new normal to come back to, that the world has the power to disrupt, interrupt, even demolish, but it’s up to us (only) to rebuild, to rekindle, to reinvent ... And that, I did not do this year and because of that the year seems emptier than others ... I can only hope that it was a learned lesson and in the years to come I will soul-search deeper and find some answers and some new rules to this game we call life, and apply them and move my life along ... 

John Lennon said that “life happens when you’re busy making other plans.” In 2021 I was not even busy making other plans. I was in this hurry-up-and-wait mode, waiting for something, some signal, some external change to reboot my world ... And it never came. I am not one to have enough patience to wait around much (I am kicking myself I waited even as much as I did, for two years now!) and I can tell you that I am full of doggedness for the next little bit to try to go after life and meet it halfway. No longer waiting, no longer watching to see what she’s up to today, and in the next week, and month, and year. Just go and try to meet her ... wherever life is ... 

I hope I can sit here 365 days from today and report back and tell you that I do have at least one accomplishment I would be proud of for 2022, but I know life is tricky and she might still have a few curve balls to throw. All I can say is: I will try a lot harder to do everything in my power to not come empty-handed again in another year. I will try to make it count. 

There are trips I want to take in this new world of travels, new books I have stacked up high to read, there are classes I want to take and speeches I want to give. There are blogs I want to write and even a book or two ... There are days and weeks I still want to spend with my family and my aging parents ... because if one thing is for sure, no one is getting younger ... There are antics I still have not seen from my brand new kitty (rescued and adopted during this so-called “empty” year of 2021 - so maybe she can be my biggest accomplishment?!), and many recipes I have not yet tried in my ever new and ever evolving and ever richer vegan world ... There is so much life, even when the world is doing everything in her power to evidence the contrary ... If there is will and hope, there will always be life ... 

I hope your year’s been full and the next one will be fuller still ... 

Be well, everyone!