I'm behind again on pictures from Washington and Oregon. Hopefully I'll get to those in the next few days. Also my point and shoot camera decided to stop working, and I'm out of space on Google Drive, so I need to figure out how I'm going to change up my process of getting things off of my phone, backed up, and online in a place people can see them.
So today, something totally different than pictures. Words. Lots of them. Like two of your are excited.
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Going into the trip, I knew I would have some bad days occasionally. I've had several, but overall I've still had far more that were good or great. On those bad days I often feel tired, overwhelmed with all of my options -- and all of the work I have to put into narrowing and selecting those options, then making a plan -- and I wonder why I'm even doing this. What did I expect to figure out? What did I expect to find? Did I hope to find some elusive grand truth? Or did I just want to see mountains and big trees?
Unfortunately, if that was my goal -- I'm still not sure I can say exactly what my goal was -- I haven't found that grand truth yet. But I have pieced together some smaller things.
Often on those bad days I find myself a combination of tired, hungry, lonely, and thus, grumpy. One of the things I've been remembering to do is to simply take care of my physical needs. When I'm hungry, I eat. If I'm tired, I either try to sleep or figure out how to sleep better the next night. If I'm complacent or can't get my mind to calm down or I just can't think of anything better to do, I try to squeeze in a workout.
This is on the top of my list, because I think it has a huge effect on other things, like mental/emotional needs. There are other things I can do, too, like take some time to read or write, go have a drink, try to find people to hang out with, etc. But a lot of the time my bad mood does stem from some kind of physical need that isn't being met, and when I finally address it, I'm almost instantly in a better mood.
Another thing that has become abundantly clear as I've went along, and I've known this for years, is that I'm not a city person. I'm simply not. For years people have told me I just needed to give more cities a chance. That I just needed to find the right city. That I'd "love" Ypsilanti, such-and-such suburb of Detroit, Chicago, Boston. And Portland. Oh my god I'd love Portland. Everyone loves Portland.
Don't get me wrong, all of those places have qualities I like about them, but I can say with certainty now, I am not a city person. I'm a small town boy. I always have been, and I most likely always will be. Portland was cool. There were a lot of things I liked about it -- but also several things about it that I didn't. I didn't fall in love with it, apologies to everyone who has ever told me how much I would. In the end it was just another city. Good restaurants and bars and lots of wacky people, sure. Also lots of pushy homeless people -- I actually heard, two different times, homeless guys approach people asking for money and then asking them to go to a nearby ATM for them!
Lots of garbage, too. The two are related.
In Calgary one night, I think the biggest city I've been to so far, I met up with a handful of people thanks to the Couch Surfing app, and actually had a pretty cool night with several strangers. They were telling me about where they were from, and I was telling them about where I was from. I kind of described how cities make me feel, and how I'm definitely a "small town boy." I kid you not, the John Mellencamp song "Small Town" came on the radio, and it felt like he was singing directly to me. (Also: Bob Seger came on two songs after that and made me feel all kinds of homesick. Also also: Different song, but I've had "Turn the Page" stuck in my head for over a week now.)
I told several people that I was not looking for a place to relocate to on this trip, but that I wouldn't rule it out. If I fell in love with an area, I'd consider moving there. So far it hasn't happened. I'll come back to northern Michigan, and I'll probably spend most of my life there. I don't think that's a bad thing -- and if you do, I don't know what to tell you. So far at least, I'll take my town of 20,000 over any city with 1 million plus.
On the days when I feel really overwhelmed, or lazy, or whatever, I do find myself beating myself up quite often. Why don't I plan better? Why can't I just figure things out in a way that makes more sense? Why can't I manage my time better? What's wrong with me?
I'm not sure anything is "wrong" with me, I think it's just a matter of perspective.
Time management is not one of my strong suits. I've actually been aware of this for a few years now, but it's come to surface again on this trip, and I think I've finally figured out a way to address it.
There are a few ways I could choose to take it on. First, I can see it as a problem. I can attempt to get better at it. I can do things in a more orderly fashion. I can keep a better schedule. I can do things quickly and efficiently and I can become really time sensitive. I can cram a bunch of things into my day, do them all. I can be a machine.
OR ... I can do none of those things, I can accept that efficient time management is not a trait of mine, and I can work around it and move on. I can not jam as many things into my day. I can space things out more, just try to get a few things done completely/done well, rather than a lot of things done with machine-like efficiency. That doesn't mean I can't imrpove this in some ways -- but overall, I think I'm just going to let it go and stop worrying about it. Rather than plot a bunch of things into my day, and then have everything fall apart when one (or all) of them takes longer than I anticipated, I can just roll with it. Something takes longer than I thought? So what? Figure it out, complete it, and move onto the next thing. Couldn't get to everything I wanted to today? So what? Get them done tomorrow or the next day.
It's not the end of my world. Apparently I have a lot of days left to do lots of different things. A few hours here and there don't matter. There's no such thing as "wasted time." (I'm not sure how much I believe that, but for right now it sounds good.)
In all these long hours I have with me, myself, and I to reflect and ponder all things, I keep coming back to the same thing, from many different angles: Embrace who I am, and don't worry about trying to change it. Be adaptable, yes, but in ways that make sense.
So I don't like cities and I often find there aren't enough hours in the day, and I'm not a social butterfly. Big deal. I'm smart, I'm fairly funny, my family loves me, I have at least a few friends who value having me around, and I'm good at a lot of different things.
I'm still trying not to think too much about what I'm going to do when I get back, with work and life and everything. I'm trying to just "enjoy the ride," literally and figuratively. But it's creeping in more and more -- and I keep telling myself I don't need to worry about it. I will figure it out, I will be fine, and I don't have to make huge changes to my life or my habits to make it all work.
Not that there isn't more to puzzle out. There is. There's a lot. But I have the pieces, and I know I can fit them together. I just might not know what the picture looks like at the end.
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In those moments that I get caught up in everything, and ask myself why I'm even doing it, what I expect to find, I keep falling back on the old cliche that It's about the journey, not the destination. And I guess there is some comfort in that. In a sense.
I think that embracing myself, and my habits, and my nature, is probably the best thing I can do. Hopefully it spills over into the rest of my life, as well as making the rest of the trip a little easier on myself. I'm going to have to find a job and hit "reset," in a way, when I get back to real life, so those lessons will probably be valuable there. Don't apologize, don't try to change, but figure out how to make it all work.
For everyone who tells me they're envious of what I'm doing, or living vicariously through me, there is someone else who -- inadvertently, and not purposely -- makes me feel like I'm "doing it wrong." The professional travelers, the ones who basically spend their lives on the road. The ones who did the same kind of trip but stretched it into a year. Or two. The ones who have traveled the whole world, twice. The ones who have spent more time traveling in the last five years than they have working. The ones who have no worries about costs and budgets.
And it's there that I, again, need to remember that I am me, and that everyone has a different journey/path/whatever. I can't do a lot of that stuff, and some of it I wouldn't even want to. And that's fine.
This kind of goes back to what I don't like about cities, or don't care about. There is the obvious stuff -- the huge numbers of people, the traffic, the parking, just too much going on, the blight, the waste, the garbage, etc. -- but a lot of the problems I have with them are less obvious. Every time I ask people what I should check out in any location, I get a long list of bars and restaurants, mostly. And that's fine, and I understand it. But it's also not really what I'm hoping to see, and if that's all I go into a city for, what's the point? I can find good food and good beer almost anywhere. (Plus, it's not in my budget to do a lot of that.)
I'm just ... different than most people. I enjoy things differently. I'm a weird mish-mash of interests and sub-cultures jammed into one person, and the balance and percentages change every few years further complicating things. It doesn't completely make sense. I don't completely make sense. But it works for me, and people close to me like it (sort of), so why change it? So it makes sense that I'd tackle a trip like this differently than most people.
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