Wandering the World Wondering
A few years ago, Kim and I were recording an audiobook in a NYC sound studio and I watched and giggled as Kim was having trouble distinguishing between the words wandering and wondering. They really are quite different words, but as different as they are, they are also somewhat similar. Do you wander the world or do you wonder about the world…or both simultaneously? I think we do both and I am sure that I have done both simultaneously most of my life.
My wandering have been in three phases. There was the youthful wandering that I did before I went to college. That included four years in Venezuela after my birth in Florida. From there I wandered to Santa Monica and the marvels of California in the 1950s, to Ithaca (where I wandered through the rural farmlands of Upstate New York) and then back south to the tropics of Costa Rica for a few years to enjoy the black sand beaches and the volcanic jungle hillsides. There I recall getting a first-hand glimpse of our colonial past with the white gloved hotels of San Jose, which stood in stark contrast to the gritty tropical valley of where we lived in the town of Turrialba. We then wandered north to the frozen tundra and ice fishing of Midwestern Wisconsin for a few years, only to leave after a few years for the even more frozen tundra of south-central Maine where we lived in what the state motto declared was Vacationland with golf, tennis, skiing and canoeing all around us. Three years of that was enough to earn us three years in the center of Western Civilization in Rome, Italy. That is where I got my real wanderer’s passport by starting down my path of motorcycling. I spent those high school years traveling all over Europe on various motorcycles as I graduated myself from one to another with a small group of friends with like inclinations and similar wanderlust…dual emphasis on the wandering and the lusting (we were teenagers after all).
That wandering phase ended with my enrollment in Cornell University, back in good old familiar Ithaca, New York. After a semester of wandering through the books, I reclaimed my mode of wandering transport and got my motorcycle again in time for the spring semester. My summers (when I was not working) were spent wandering through New England to revisit old haunts. By the time I graduated from Cornell with two degrees and headed to New York City, I had temporarily shed my motorcycle in favor of a car and the upright citizenry of the banking profession. That, strangely enough, took me back to wandering the roads of first New England and then Europe as a traveling financial salesman. What I sold was less important than the wandering of the world it afforded. By the time I reclaimed my motorcycle, I was also graduating to running businesses that had me retracing my steps to Latin America (yes, I went back to both Venezuela and Costa Rica) as well as wandering through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. In other words, I had moved on to wandering the world, less for the wandering and more for the financial opportunity. I did, however, spend some quality time on the motorcycle traveling the Southwestern U.S. and various countries in Europe.
This phase of my wandering bought me squarely to my biggest moments of wondering. Before college, wandering was something I had to do and only began to want to do with my motorcycle. I never once wondered where I was going, which is what happens when you are raised by a driven woman with a Ph.D.. After college I found myself on a track that had its fair share of wandering, but it was always with a purpose underlying it and that purpose was business and career advancement, which I found I was pretty good at. The little bit of voluntary wandering I did was devoid of wondering because it was purely recreational, whether on a motorcycle or otherwise. Even when I wandered off-course during business travels, it was less about wondering about the world at large and more about taking a leisure break from all the required wandering. And so it went for some 45 years until I found myself face-to-face with the cumulative wonders of life which everyone encounters at one time or another.
I am now in my final phase of wandering and wondering and I would observe that the ratio is changing with the wandering component becoming less prevalent as the wondering just keeps growing and growing. In fact, I spend a fair amount of time even wondering about wandering, which seems somehow ironic given the amount of wandering I have done throughout my life. You would think that given that I have wandered much of the face of the earth in my life and even lived on four of the seven continents (South America, North America, Europe and Asia…since I choose to count my two months in Tokyo as being a loooong time). I’ve traveled extensively in both Africa and Australia for both business and leisure, but have not lived in either, and I have not and will not get to Antarctica since it seems to be shrinking by the day due to Global Warming and there isn’t that much to see there anyway.
Having taken a trip through Europe, the Middle East and touching on North Africa last year and just gotten back from a trip to SE Asia and contemplating a trip next year to Patagonia through the Drake Passage, I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time wondering whether we should keep wandering the globe so much. I am about as ambivalent as a person can be on the topic. I feel I have travelled enough. I feel like I prefer staying home on my hilltop whenever I can. But having travel to look forward to and to look back upon seems important to us. How to find that balance? I wonder, perhaps too much, about our wandering program.
This morning I heard from my old high school friend Tom. Tom is someone who played a meaningful part in my first phase of wandering, especially in the motorcycle-based tripping around Europe. I mostly lost touch with Tom during the middle stage when I did so much intensive business wandering. During those days, Tom was not doing so much wandering himself. But we connected pretty much when the whole business wandering program came to an end and the third phase of wandering began. Since then I would suggest that Tom is spending far more time wandering while I spend my time wondering about my wandering. Today he told me he is going to England for five weeks and then coming back to sell his house in Santa Fe so that he and his wife, Brenda, can move to Brisbane, Australia where he seems to think he will spend his retirement years. That feels like more wandering than I want to do. But that is what makes for horse races. We all have different tolerances for wandering and those tendencies occur at different stages of our lives.
I guess I have done my quotient of wandering the world more than Tom has and I am more in need of spending time wondering while he still needs more wandering. I wonder what will come next for us both in terms of wandering.