Day 424: How we feel
We let it change us.
I suspect that many of you are behind in reading this blog. That’s ok – we’re behind in writing it. Maybe we can let today, of all days, be one of blogging forgiveness.
Today is our last day abroad in Gap Year. I write these words sitting in a café in Panama, on a half day layover between Florianópolis, Brazil and home sweet SFO. While it is the end of our trip in many ways, we still plan on finishing this memorial writing project, taking the time we need to document our experiences (don’t worry, we’ve been keeping good notes). Today, I want to take the opportunity to capture our feelings of the present moment.
Bittersweet
What single word better sums up our feelings about the end of Gap Year? We have been looking forward to and dreading this day for quite some time by now. Finally walking the walk, these past few days, I have had a palpable sense of fear. The way I make sense of it is that we’re going through a lot of life transitions all at once. I’ll explain the details of this later, but two days ago I signed a job offer. We’re changing from waking up in a different bed every three days or so to one bed until further notice, with a singular roof overhead. I remember similar jitters before the start of Gap Year, for the fear of the great unknown. This feels remarkably similar despite the utter predicability of our immediate future. Maybe, the remaining unknown is about whether or not I’ll be OK living a normal life. My mind says “yes” while my heart flinches.
Meanwhile, I can’t wait to be home and Gap Year couldn’t be over quicker! I’m so excited to see my friends and family after so, so long! The new job seems tantalizing and life-affirming, and I find it hard to avoid reading whitepapers and technical documentation to start generating ideas. After seeing many of the corners of the globe, we’ve accumulated a sublime love of our home town in the central coast, gearing up to plant down Serious Roots™, to become engrossed in community. Camille has put new words to these feelings – our home town is “our habitat.” Equipped with all sorts of new tools, I want to re-discover our area as if we are visitors there for the first time, leaving no rock or leaf unturned, maybe building up to writing local travel guides. I can’t begin to tell you the number of projects I want to start in our home – longstanding expressions of community building and connectedness.
With a fixed sense of place, we’re given the gift of a long term, specific future, one that we’re welcomed to plan around. Gap Year has been the peak of a long trend of our life of uprootedness. For the last eight years since graduating – if not longer – Camille and I have been untethered. We’ve moved about once every two years on average until the pandemic, which then thrust us into approximate-nomadism. After such a grand exploration of space, I think the greatest sense of adventure we can pursue is across a grand stretch of time.
Gratitude
A word that only begins to describe how we feel about our trip. I sincerely believe that I am the luckiest human being to live on this green Earth, with Camille a close second. She mostly agrees with me, maybe disputing the order. If anything, when talking to people about Gap Year, I mostly feel embarrassed. I’ll have normal conversations with fellow travelers we meet on the road or people I haven’t caught up with in a while. Before I know it, I have to recall the concrete details about what’s going on with us. Telling them cursory figures feels disgustingly indulgent or braggadocious, so I try to minimize it as much as possible. Often, they can’t believe what I’m saying, and I don’t blame them – I barely believe any of this is real either. It’s such an outlier experience that we barely are able to process it all. I think my brain only makes sense of it as 50 week-ish long vacations, each their own microcosms, somehow also planned back-to-back. We’re so full of novel experiences that most of the time, we’re incredibly tired, barely able to consolidate yesterday’s memories before making new ones tomorrow. If I had any predictions for our near future, it’s that given the first opportunity, we’ll sleep for three days straight. More likely, it will take us years to really process the experiences of this last year. For this, on top of the mountain of privilege in our lives to make it possible, we are eternally grateful.
Changed
We set out to let this trip change us, and it has. Innumerable, I like to explain this way: If you’ve ever known Camille, then you probably know that she is a bit of a planner/worrier. She gets one trait from each parent, and she is the manifestation of the combination. Well, just two days ago, we took a boat trip to an island in the south of Brazil to catch some precious December sunshine. Once we arrived on the beach, Camille noticed that she left her sandals on the boat! Now, in my normal mental model of Camille, this would be a big deal. We’d have to rally the troops, or at least the boat staff, and track down the shoes or the whole day would be ruined – or else! But you know what happened? She shrugged. Sure, we’d likely be able to recover the shoes on the boat ride back. But more than that, deep inside Camille felt that if she lost the shoes, it would be no big deal.
This sense of calm in Camille’s heart, with no exaggeration, is revolutionary. It’s more than the shoes. She talks slower. A deep sense of ease runs through her heart. I have it too. It took me some three months to decompress from the stress of work. With the remainder, we have been gifted with a window into ourselves. From this laboratory of decisions and cultivated garden of human experience, we have learned who we are – together and within ourselves.
How have I changed? Well, I don’t remember ever being ok just being with myself before now. A deep value of mine, I nearly always try to grow. I think in exploring the globe, I’ve found other directions to channel my growth. “Ambition always takes you somewhere else,” Nazir, one of our hosts at the Kunnar Beach House, once told me. I didn’t understand what he said about tranquility then, but I think I do now. If I’ve changed, I have a deep contentment with where I am, wherever I go. A useful corollary of this development: I’ve healed some of my terminal people-pleasing tendencies.
The Road Ahead
After I publish this essay, we’ll explore this neighborhood of Panama. We’ll then hop in a cab and fly to SFO. One of my best friends – Adam, who gave a speech at Cam and my wedding – is picking us up from the airport, technically on his way down to San Diego. The next day, Camille will see her best friend, Rei. So will begin the great reunion with the people that make up home.
We don’t think Gap Year is technically over. Every year, we go to Yosemite for Christmas with Camille’s side of the family. This year is no different. Our last days of Gap Year, we’ll spend in Curry Village, eating chocolate chip cookies and drinking Maker’s Mark with the ones we love. After Christmas, we’ll drive home, and finally sleep in our bed. What an alien and cozy place, our king-sized bed must be. The next adventure begins as soon as we wake up.
