The High Cost of Loving or Being an Adventurer

A lot of people I know, or people who I know were close to, have died or been seriously injured this year. It's been a shitty year with a lot more of that than I'm used to.

In fact, this year is the first time I've been to a funeral service for a person over the age of thirty. The majority of people I know who have died were my own generation.

Patagonia

I might go there in December and January. And that would be epic.

It's a volunteer program--you get down there, help take down fencing in the National park (it's in Chile), and get some days off and you can explore some of the most epically beautiful land in the entire world.

I'm having some issues regarding how I want to handle My Future.

I want to move to California in the spring, specifically the LA area, but I want to have some money saved up first. I also want to travel. Which costs a lot of money.

I don't want to put off finding an industry career type job so long that I become irrelevant, but I don't want to feel like I've wasted years doing some job just to wake up at 50 to realize I'm dissatisfied.

Tough decisions. But a few weeks in another country just sounds right to me. I'd like to WOOF it, but the places I want to go tend to restrict genders or how long you can be there, or have other weird hoops to hop through.

I've thought about heading to Japan and just teaching English as a tutor, which can be a great way to make money, but I am not that enthused about spending a lot of time in heavily populated areas--which was part of why, when thinking about visiting East Asia, Laos sounded so cool, especially if I was going to backpack around.

So Chile? Only recently came into my radar as a place to go, to help, to explore. It's always been Asia, all parts of Asia, which capture my interest. But the thought of going to Chile, surprisingly, does not seem like settling to me. It sounds like a great adventure in a dynamic country that could use some volunteers to take down some fences. I wouldn't be donating money to a gov't or organization, and I wouldn't be taking anything but pictures. I'd be trying to give something to the Chilean people that they deserve, access to a spacious, gorgeous national park which would preserve a piece of their geologic and social history. And it's not me giving that to them, either--not really. I'd just be doing some grunt work.

Onward to Patagonia? The land of huge mountain peaks, breathtaking coastlines, epic valleys? A land with a history so rich even the dinosaurs were something special?

I'm in.

Life-Changing Moments

The title is a bit of a misnomer or incorrect phrase, I think. I mean, every moment is a life-changing one, isn't it? With every bit of passing time our lives, our memories, expand and our present moves...well, not forward, because we are always right where we are, but the past gets...bigger, I guess.

The moments I mention, though, are the BIG moments, the moments whose memories dwarf all others in scope and emotion. The death of a loved one, a decision with far-reaching repercussions, marriage, children. Those sorts of things. I have had a few of these in my life--the sad thing about them is, the biggest ones (at least for me) have been tragedies. I think it's about time for some good ones--the good ones we end to make ourselves--we choose to marry, we choose to have a child, we choose to do whatever. We never choose to have a loved one get seriously injured or die. But when that happens, nothing else seems to matter.

And when these things do happen, at least for me, I start to do a series of weird calculations and over-thinking. Regrets come to the fore, guilt, sadness...anger. For a long while recently I was very angry. I still am kind of angry, but now it's more abstract, unfocused. But it boils. and simmers. Like a geyser, maybe, building below the surface.

As much as I hate these tragic life-changers, and I want them to never happen to anyone, there's something amazing about them. You realize things, perhaps, that you never thought of before. You are forced to think things through, evaluate. You're forced to look at your life and decide what's worth it and what isn't.

I am a much more depressed person than I was six months ago. But I have a different outlook on life, not a worse or better one, just different. I am not the same person. No one could be. And I am just as lost as before. So it's hard to gauge this sort of thing. I know, for example, that I am not quite ready to leave Colorado, though I am getting there (and I think I will be going in Spring, at least). I know I am really really lucky. I know the people in my life who matter to me.