Accidentally in Code

Tag: travel

It’s Not a Disaster

Credit: http://www.bighappyfunhouse.com/archives/11/03/30/14-54-33.html

Travel gives me a lot of time to think, the planes, the airports, the queues. And the jetlag – there’s no lonelier time than four in the morning, wherever you happen to be.

Probably clear from my last post that I’ve had a lot to think about, lately. Still going to have to be enigmatic and elusive (sorry!), but things are looking up.

Currently, I oscillate between fear that things can’t just work out the way it seems like they might, and this calm conviction that three months from now my life if going to be unrecognizable, and all this chaos and drama is going to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

I’m not normally a big fan of poetry, but there is one poem that I like – One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

I think she is saying it is a disaster, but still. I find it comforting. It’s hard to feel your world falling to pieces around you; it’s hard to lose the things you cling to. Yes, it brings potential, but at 4am that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to cry – that loss seems insurmountable, at the loneliest time of day.

And I just let it be. OK, this is my worst case scenario. It is not, in fact, a disaster. And, interestingly, the more I activate my best-case scenario, the more the worst-case scenario seems like a precious thing that I don’t want to lose, either.

At 4am, I look at myself and realize that I are not the person I aspire to be. I know that in a different reality I might have talked about change a lot, but been unable to actually do it because I wouldn’t have wanted to let go of something. But the something is breaking apart, and as that happens – it tells me to go for it. It’s time.

May 9, 2012
Losing Anchors

© Copyright L S Wilson and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

When I get stressed travelling, I have this mantra that I repeat to myself:

Passport, wallet, keys, cellphone. Everything else you can buy.

It doesn’t mean that losing/forgetting something else might not be expensive, or a giant pain to fix. The point is, that only the loss of some things is a genuine crisis. I can’t pretend that I have a handle on everything, but those 4 things I can probably keep track of.

When things are uncertain, I try to anchor myself around things that I know.

Which is hard when things disappear, and for me April has been a month of that. My bike was stolen, from a locked room in a locked building. And not only did I lose my bike, I also lost my feeling of safety at home. My boyfriend and I broke up, and he hates me now. He always said that whatever happened, we were too reasonable to be acrimonious about it. This was always my worst-case scenario. Sometimes it sucks to be right. And two more things, one of which seemed the most important thing ever until the second thing went, and now seems trivial. And the second, which has left me devastated.

I can’t talk about what the two things are, but in some ways it doesn’t matter. The point is – three out of four of these things were anchors for me. My home is safe. My boyfriend was like my closest friend, and had been a close friend for years. And losing anchors, leave me adrift and lost and confused. The world is huge, and I would like something certain to cling to, and right now I feel – I got nothing.

Of course I don’t. I have great friends, geographically disparate (which, weirdly makes me feel even less anchored – go here, that’s where A is, but B is in this place, which is not a bad option either). I have money. I have places I could live. But perhaps this is it – I have options, and no certainty. And that makes me nervous.

Out for dinner with two friends. One of whom gives the best hugs. They make me feel so safe. He says, “everything is going to be OK”. My other friend looks at me like she thinks I’m a little crazy and says, “I don’t know why you are afraid. I have never seen you in a situation that you couldn’t handle”.

I’d like to make her certainty, my certainty. That whatever happens, I’ll figure it out. Because that’s also how I make my other friend right – I’ll figure it out, and then everything will be OK.

And I realize that, uncertainty is hard, and stressful, but with it comes possibility. And anchors are hard to lose, but without them, you’re very free.

April 27, 2012
Excitement!

by Jan Kalle Ribbert. Some rights reserved.

About 3 weeks ago, I sat in San Francisco airport and waited, as the delay on my flight crept up and up. Some time around 5pm, when I’d been there since 10am, I felt like, I could cry right then. Just start sobbing. In public. The lounge had closed, and I was sitting by the gate, stuck in the airport, wondering why I hadn’t just pushed my flight back to the next day. And wanting to cry.

This is why I get tired of travelling. It’s sitting in an airport, watching your weekend disappear. It’s waiting by the carousel for 45 minutes (the priority label on my bag means NOTHING) as the event I had timed my flight to be back in plenty of time for starts without me, after a 3.5 hour delay and now…. this.

I made an anguished noise and stamped my feet (in the face of this, I am 5, apparently) and my intern said “yes”. I look at him and he continues, “you’ve expressed something there, that I feel too”. We commiserate with each other – it sucks to feel powerless.

When I got status I thought that would change things. It hasn’t. The wait should be more comfortable, in the lounge, but when the lounge is before security, and they keep pushing back 30 minutes each time… I spent more time waiting at the gate than in the lounge.

And so I’ve come to dread getting on a plane. I don’t really believe that any of my flights will be on time. The thought of Toronto airport makes me shudder.

But, I’ve been trying to book this trip to Sydney for over a week. And the Air Canada website kept failing, giving me stupid error messages and demanding that I call them. I hate calling companies. So I just gave up and tried again the next day.

After a week of this, someone suggests I try a travel agent. But first I have to track them down. They don’t want to help me because I don’t live in the US, but there is some elaborate system I can use to convince them to help me. I get half way through this. The website keeps reloading on my Android phone. I broadcast a wireless network to connect my iPhone, and it doesn’t work there either. I try Air Canada one last time on my iPad and… success! I book quickly, before I bottle it.

Realize I’ve booked my flight to leave on an evening when I’m supposed to be somewhere. I had a date planned, but decided to leave a day before to allow for the delay that I have come to expect, see as normal. But that can be dealt with.

And then… I get excited. I’m going to Sydney! My first time to Australia! My first time to the Southern Hemisphere!

On a roll, the next day I book a hotel. The website doesn’t work. I call them; they don’t pick up. The other website doesn’t work. I call another number. It works! I have a reservation! I even email the spa. I want to book into the spa the day I arrive, but flight times have come to seem just a suggestion, a ballpark, if you will. I request an appointment two days later instead.

But… I’m excited. Still. This is the first trip I’ve been excited for… in what feels like forever. I feel lucky.

People say, you’re lucky to travel so much. And I think no, because the reality to me, has been sitting in an airport, feeling grimy and uncomfortable, watching my free time or sleep schedule disappear. But right now, I feel lucky. And excited. And ready for another adventure. Flying half way around the world, alone, I’ve done before. But the direction, that’s new. Can’t wait.

March 23, 2012
On Having Adventures

There are a zillion things to do in New York City, but my favorite thing to do is walk across it. Every kind of person, demographic. See people out shopping, walking home after a marathon, out with their kids. Overhear people speaking Spanish, Italian, Farsi, French, Chinese, Japanese, and, yes, English – American, and English-English, with a bunch of different regional accents too.

And you see the things that you see everywhere, brunch places, department stores, beauticians, hotels, convenience stores, the ubiquitous Starbucks. And then those things that you only see in NYC, like 24 caret gold facial treatments, and a store for just one kind of candy (M&Ms, surprisingly little chocolate, and lots of pajamas).

So as I took a long walk along 7th, I was thinking about adventures. I love MOMA, and the view from the Empire State Building is pretty awesome, but the experiences I remember most fondly are: the Mauizio Cattelan exhibit I saw at the Guggenheim last time (see a video here), because it was extraordinary. My friends and I, hanging out on the Highline, transfixed by the vertical carpark, trying to determine the algorithm for operating it efficiently. And the encounter with the random guy I met when my plane was delayed for 8 hours, who showed me the lesser known queue for taxis at LGA, and taught me how to bribe someone.

When I was in China, we weren’t too excited about the Great Wall, but wondering around the forbidden city we met a woman whose boyfriend would take us to a slightly different part of the wall than most of the tourists went to. And it sounded cool, so we went. And it was – when someone was being snotty about tourist traps the other day I said that there are some things that a lot of people go to see because they were worth seeing. And the great wall is – the view is amazing, it stretches as far as you can see. You can wax lyrical about how small and insignificant it makes you feel, if you are that way inclined. But the experience that made more of an impression on me, was meeting these women at Moon Hill in Yangshuo who walked up and down the hill, all day every day, carrying postcards and a cooler of drinks to sell. I started off being irritated that they were coming with us, but by the time we got back down again I realized they were amazing. They were my real lesson on humanity – on the difference in work ethic, and expectations, between them and those of us who live in the West. Up the Pearl tower, my friend and I jumped up and down trying to take pictures that looked as though we were flying, but I really felt like I was flying when I was riding a scooter for the first time, until that unfortunate incident with the two trucks and the large pile of rocks.

In Japan, I skiied with a bunch of random Australians where they held the 1998 Olympics, and wondered through the temple from the Memoirs of a Geisha. But I felt like I appreciated Japanese culture and Japan in general the most when I was hanging out in Harajuku. Love the outfits. Particularly love the hats.

Of course my favorite kind of adventure, is to go and live somewhere new. Moving to Canada with a week’s notice? Making it work? That was hard. But rewarding. Moving again within the province, to KW, was relatively easy by comparison. Next, a non-English-speaking country, because that will be a real challenge.

And so one of the things I realized this morning is that for me, the adventure doesn’t happen at the destination, it happens often unexpectedly, somewhere on the way. It might be easier to find an extraordinary experience in NYC (fancy that 24 caret facial?), but I think with the right attitude and travel companions, you can have an adventure in Winnipeg (like when my friend got trapped in an escalator). And I don’t normally bother to share what I thought of the Great Wall of China, but those women from Moon Hill? I’ve talked about them a bit.

On my way to MTV with my intern, I shared with him my calm travel philosophy – wallet, keys, phone, passport. Anything else you can buy. Except for adventures, they’re free, as long as you’re open to them, and you’re not so fixated on the check-list of things to see, that you let them go whooshing by. Kind of like me, on that scooter, headed towards that truck.

March 19, 2012
Making Time for Cate-Time

Credit: Flickr / Telstar Logistics

On a Monday nights lately, I’m buzzed from skiing. I actually committed to something – an 8-week long, twice a week, race training program.

This is massive for me, as having taken a trip a month for very nearly two years, it seemed like I had lost the ability to commit to anything. And that was a problem, because it was making me unhappy. I was a strung out, nervous wreck, from travelling too much, having a stressful job (I love my job, I do, but I don’t just hang out in a micro-kitchen with breaks to take the slide all day. I work really hard).

And, I was making myself more unhappy by considering not just what I wanted, but what other people thought or felt.

So, something terrible happens and I think I don’t get to be as upset as the person who is closer to it, so I better pull myself together. It doesn’t work like that – people express their “upsetness” in different ways.

People say “oh you’re so lucky, I’d love to travel that much”, or (more annoyingly) “oh, I don’t get bothered by planes and jetlag myself, I just love it” (when they rarely go anywhere) and I feel guilty, or, angry. Because going to live somewhere for at least a month? That’s cool. Vacation? Bring it. Going to work somewhere else is often just a different commute. A different commute somewhere you don’t have a gym membership. Luckily I know people most of the places I go, but before my friend moved to NYC it kinda sucked – it’s a cool city, love it during the day, but don’t really want to or feel safe exploring it after dark, alone.

And then there’s the whole, if you’re not 100% happy all the time you should give up working for the man and become an entrepreneur thing. Which, much as I admire and support my entrepreneurial friends, is not me right now. I’m not interested in having my own company. The even more irrational flipside is, I 100% don’t want to start a company, and therefore I must be 100% happy all the time. Even if I’m not. That was getting me in a tizzy. And, the thing is, I think if you love your job you’re not going to be 100% happy all the time. Because things are never going to be 100% perfect. The raspberry panda liquorice that was so delicious, is never seen again. Product managers do their thing. Really smart people are often the most frustrating to work with. I get the highs – the raspberry liquorice, the shipping something an unimaginable number of people use, the incredible learning, the rush when you demo… and highs come with lows. I have that kind of temperament – when I’m delighted, I’m delighted. When I’m frustrated, I’m pissed. It’s easy never to get frustrated with your job if you don’t really care about it. I do, so anything less than amazing bothers me. There’s not much that’s less than amazing, but enough that from time to time I get really frustrated.

Anyway, I tell myself, all the time, that nothing changes unless you make it change. And so I took a vacation, and skiied and spa’d and relaxed. And then I came back, started working out at the new gym, upped my trainer to twice a week, and registered for race training.

Here’s the big difference – at the weekend, I do whatever it is I want to do. The weekend just gone I drove to the US with a couple of friends to buy cherry coke, and then on the Sunday I did bootcamp, 90 mins cardio, spin, and went swimming. Yes, I effectively spent the whole day at the gym – I have time to do that again now. The weekend before, on the Saturday I did spin, an hours cardio, and went swimming, and on the Sunday I did spin, 2 hours skiing, 80 mins cardio, and hot yoga. That one was pretty much a whole weekend of physical activity, interspersed with meals at my favorite restaurants in town. Awesome.

It feels like last year, every weekend I was either, on a plane, lying down because I was exhausted from taking a plane, or organizing myself because I was about to get on another sodding plane. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And the change in my energy, my stress levels… it’s dramatic.

Anyway, I guess what I learned from all this is to stop looking at how happy or sad other people are and berate myself for imagined ingratitude… and just make time for the things that make me happy. My idea of an ideal Sunday isn’t everyones… but that is 100% OK.

February 22, 2012
Misconceptions of What Software Engineers Do

Credit: flickr / novaldiflickr

My first proper day on my new project, and our PM says to me – “Cate, you seem to like to travel. How about you spend time in New York?” – I’m tasked with helping another team out, and being the bridge between that team and my team here.

Initially I was a bit… thrown. Part of why I’d changed teams was because I didn’t want to need to go to California as often. Whilst I’d joked that it would be different if it was somewhere I’d actually chose to spend time, like New York, I’d also enjoyed my time staying still, and wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue making (typically – June was the first month since March 2010 that I didn’t go anywhere) a trip a month.

Once I’d got over the surprise, two things struck me. The first, that this guy had – in a matter of days – noticed what I was good at and was working with my non-eng strengths – being a connector, and something of a nomad.

The second, was that what I was going to spend my time doing, completely debunked a very depressing conversation I’d had with two (female) CS teachers. They’d talked about why their female students didn’t want to go into Engineering – and one of them, why she left industry for education. It was… somewhat stereotypical. Girls like to make things pretty. They’d prefer to market something than build it. Women are more interested in the big picture, how things fit together. They want to spend time with people, not machines.

About a year ago, someone asked me if I was interested in working on a compiler team. I said, “I think I’d enjoy it for about 6 months, and then I’d start to miss humans”. He was amused and replied that my response was what he’d expected me to say.

I suspect you have to be a particular kind of person to work on a compiler team. I am not that kind of person. In fact, many of the things these teachers saw in their female students are true of me, too. I like things to be pretty. I care not just about what something does from a technical perspective, but why it’s useful. I’m better at a system design level than at bit-twiddling. I’m obsessed with humans and how technology can improve things for them.

Yes, I love to write code, and that is a big part of my job. But – it’s not all that I do. To say that being a software engineer is like X, and girls won’t like it because they don’t like X is a mistake.

In this case, I think the thing about girls not liking X is a massive over-simplification and generalization. But my point – even if it is accurate – it doesn’t mean that being a software engineer isn’t a good fit. Being a software engineer is not “like X” – that’s far too simplistic. There’s so many different kinds of things you can work on, and they require different skill sets. I would be unhappy and not very good at compiler work, but the kind of person who would excel at working on compilers would likely be unhappy and not very good at the kind of work that I do.

I don’t just write code. I also think about user interaction – working on features, I will say, I think this flow is more consistent. I work on the design of components from a perspective of the overall system – and testability. I work with other people who have less experience on the codebase or in the language to get them up to speed. I write up patents, and get to explain what I’ve come up with to lawyers. I put myself in the perspective of the user and think about what will be most important to me as a user. And I’m a connector – sometimes the most useful thing I bring to a discussion isn’t what I know, but that I know who will know about it.

Of course, there are things that I’m terrible at. I can’t see pixel differences, in fact if you show me one UI and then another similar one I will be pushed to see the difference between them, and certainly not in a matter of pixels. I’m not great at convincing myself that something is programmatically correct – probably why I love testing. I can’t “hack”, it makes me nervous when I don’t know why something works. I can’t write assembly. When I need to optimize, my preferred plan is “write it in Haskell”.

To take a narrow view of what you need to be good at in order to enjoy being an engineer, is crazy to me. All over the world, software engineers are building an unimaginable number of wildly different things. I’m incredibly lucky, but I think if you work at it you can often create the flexibility to make it whatever you want.

So what if girls want to make things pretty. There’s too much ugly software out there, and I say – go for it. All I think matters is – do they want to solve problems? Build cool things? Can they think logically and break down a problem?

September 12, 2011
Dealing With More Travel
Credit: http://qlikd.com/airport/

I really enjoyed my 6 weeks of going nowhere. I know, I don’t get to complain because my life sounds so glamorous – but reality is different.

Oh New York! You’re so lucky.

I know, the hotel was wonderful, the office fantastic, and the three blocks in between? Just fabulous.

This was the trip I struggled most with. In part because I’m exhausted and overdue the holiday (yay! another plane!) that I will leave on at the end of the week. Also because of a series of unfortunate events:
- My flight out was delayed by 8 hours (thankfully the upgrade had been very cheap – most that day $4 over economy – when I booked, so I was in the lounge), causing me to arrive at nearly 2am.
- On the afternoon that I planned to go early to see MOMA, it was tipping it down. As I was looking forward to the walk across town as much as the museum itself, I decided to wait for the rain to stop. Engrossed in what I was doing, I didn’t notice the time (or that it was no longer raining) until it was too late.
- My flight to Ottawa boarded just-about on time, but then after we’d turned off our electronic devices for takeoff just sat on the tarmac for about 45 minutes, with no announcement, nothing. After some time, it just suddenly took off.
- My flight back to Toronto was massively oversold and I had to hang about by the gate hoping for a seat it seemed unlikely I’d get, thinking if they would just tell me I’d be fine with an hours delay – I could just go to a restaurant and get something to eat. I did get on the plane, very last row. The woman in the seat next to me told me she’d been observing the girl at the gate – who’d been really snotty when I went to see what was going on, and to her as well – but was being charming to all the men. Urgh.
- After arriving in Toronto I went to get the shuttle to KW. The guy told me it would be there in <15 minutes… actually it was about 45.
Normally I manage to roll with these kind of things more easily, it’s just how it is when you travel. I think that I was lucky to get on the oversold flight, and definitely very fortunate to get out of New York before the hurricane. Normally I’d find it funny that the receptionist at the fancy Ottawa hotel told me “Internet is extra, $15 a day, but it is wifi” – like that’s impressive? It’s 2011, of course it’s wifi.

But – not when I’m exhausted and fed up of flitting about. The trip was so useful and I got so much done that I will definitely be going back, so I need to find a way to make this work. I did two weeks away in August, and expect to do the same in September (albeit, one week holiday) and October. I can’t have each trip make me this unhappy.

Some things to think about:
- Flight time. Flights later in the day are more likely to be delayed.
- Distance from hotel to office: a 20 minute walk might mean I see more of the city and get some exercise.
- Set an alarm: normally I don’t, but several days I woke up about 30 minutes after I needed to if I wanted to work out before whatever I was doing.
- Snacks: need something to eat or a protein shake if I want to work out in the morning.
- Water: travel is so dehydrating, need to make more of a point of drinking lots of water after my flight gets in.
- Doing something cultural is a must, if leaving early is too hard then leaving a day later would be better (not an option this time, as I had to get to Ottawa).
Do you have any strategies for dealing with work travel? Please share!
August 29, 2011
Bagels, Chores, and Compromises

Credit: flickr / Philip Morton

I discovered something new about where I live at the weekend. The nearby drugmart doesn’t sell bagels. I’d always assumed that they would, but when I tested that theory I found it lacking. Living in a small place, there wasn’t anywhere I could continue on to and so I ended up at my boyfriend’s apartment practically in tears saying “I hate it here”.

Something of an overreaction. To be fair, I was a little strung out because after nearly two months of deliberation my paper got accepted (yay) and I was given… two and a half weeks to make edits. Of course I get this news last thing on the Sunday night of a long weekend, and it hangs over me all week. My earlier paper was invited to be extended as a journal paper (something I’ve been ignoring with everything else that has been going on) but I should be able to put some of the stuff that is being cut from the second paper into that… Meanwhile, I discover that my work permit has come through and I can leave the country again (!), making tentative plans of New York next week and MTV the week after into reality.

Except MTV is infeasible because I have to do these papers – the timing of that trip is more flexible than my attitude on travelling with two laptops. But, what better motivation to get cracking on Saturday morning than a trip to NYC?

And instead I’m having a crisis on where I live. There are so many things that I love about KW – my job, the people at work, the office, the people in the community and the amount of stuff happening. It is, in so many ways, an awesome place to live.

The problem, for me as a city girl, is not things to do, but when I’m not doing things. Going to the grocery store is such a palaver because it’s so far away (although I did end up trying a closer one that I’d been nervous of because it looked sketchy. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought). I’ve finally found a tasty Lebanese place that will do lamb kebab sandwiches (perfect post spinning – protein, and just enough carbs so stop me from keeling over), but it’s a 10 minute drive away in the middle of an industrial park. There is nowhere within walking distance to pick up Asian food (there is one really good pizza place, but I try not to eat that kind of stuff) and there is only one place we will order in from (tried others, with varying degrees of fail). The result – for me – is that whilst it’s easy to go out, it’s actually really quite stressful to try and have a night curled up in my apartment with a book. I flit about enough, that doing a weekly grocery shop and stocking up on stuff just seems to end up being wasteful – I never know how much I’ll be home. Mostly I shop for clothes etc when I travel, in the US, Toronto or Ottawa, but I ended up doing some shopping the other week, and it involved going to two malls – at either end of KW – because they are both small and don’t have a huge selection of shops.

To come back to the work I was supposed to be doing when I was instead having a crisis… I don’t enjoy writing papers. It’s a lot of work, in a very rigid structure, for what? A trip to Switzerland – the best part of which was the date in Geneva with my boyfriend and the train ride to and from the conference through the stunning country. The new paper is in Singapore, somewhere I’ve long wanted to go, and we’re likely going to make it a holiday. Unfortunately the timing of it means I’m supposed to simultaneously be in Singapore and Seattle. Thankfully the time-zone difference makes that almost possible! I know, I’m lucky to get to go to these places, but the reality is – and anyone who travels for work says this – mostly it’s not fun, and you barely see anything. In California, I just end up at work 8-8 and yes, the campus is amazing, and it’s much warmer in winter, but unless I’m somewhere for the weekend as well I barely get to see anything. It seems that I spend ages on a paper, send it away, wait for ages, have to make the changes they request in a hurry, wait some more, travel, and I get to list one more thing that is somehow supposed to be an “achievement” but really just feels like a chore.

So – the question I have to ask is, why am I doing this if I hate it? Why am I more likely to be doing something that I feel “obliged” to do than something I actually want to do? Because I don’t like to let people down, and because I feel that I need to prove that I was smart, talented, and hard-working enough that me escaping rather than graduating from grad school is not completely my failure. That I didn’t just learn about things that make a terrible manager, and walking away from a sucky situation – that I also learned how to play the publications game. With this latest paper, I met the goal I set myself – of two on-topic publications – that would prove that if I had been willing to pay thousands of dollars to bang my head against a brick wall for a while longer, I’d have an MSc. Comparing this to working on products that get used by an unfathomable number of people, it seems like I shouldn’t care. But I do.

Meanwhile, why do I live here, if I hate it? Because it’s not for ever, and because mostly the good outweighs the bad. It just didn’t seem that way, that morning. It’s rare that you don’t end up having a trade-off between where you live, and what you do. Pick the city, or be tied there by your partner’s career, and you’re constrained by what’s available and how far you’ll commute – and of course, often these constraints limit your career, and I refuse to to let that be me. Pick the company, decide that the opportunity is more important than the location and you end up living where the opportunity you follow is.

July 13, 2011
Right Now Is Just Fine
Credit: Wikimedia.org

I travel completely chaotically. Most of the time I can’t remember where I’m staying (yay for free wifi at airports), I almost never exchange currency in advance, and I would never dream of arriving the “recommended” three hours before an international flight.

The thing is, I know it will never be as awful as taking the boat from Yantai to Dalian in China (I survived). And I will never cut it quite as fine as the time my friend got confused and thought my flight time from Munich airport was the time I needed to leave (I made it).

So, why worry? I’m neurotic about the location of my passport (rather than send it to the US for renewal I returned to the UK because I couldn’t cope with the thought of being without it), my wallet, and my phone and laptop, and now my Kindle (Amazon). Everything else can be replaced, or coped without. In China, I also worry about having enough hard cash, but that’s it.

My trip to Switzerland had me wondering if this was a good strategy, however. The breakfast snack served by Air Canada made me extremely nauseous, and then the following morning we rushed out the hotel before 6am for my boyfriend to make his flight. I had only the vaguest idea of where I was going, but it was ok – free wifi at Geneva airport to look it up! Then I realized the wheel on my suitcase was broken, it was draggable but a pain. But still, I worked out the ticketing system and got myself on a train (with time to pick up delicious croissant, natch) and rescue some unfortunate American that didn’t speak French. I had to change trains, but I got a ticket and found out which and boarded with minutes to spare. I honestly don’t know if the Swiss are just particularly efficient with lots of trains or whether I was ridiculously lucky, but I didn’t spend any time hanging about waiting!

But, my suitcase was driving me nuts and I was stressing that the wheel would give out completely. Also, I was doubting myself – should I have had a plan? Was my boyfriend and I deciding on impulse on Thursday that we would have a date in Geneva insane? Would my flight on Wednesday be cutting it too fine? How was I going to write my first academic talk when it turns out my co-supervisor won’t be there to get some insight from?

And then, as we headed upwards towards the mountains I looked out the window. And realized that 1. Switzerland is so very beautiful. And 2. Right now, is just fine.

And then, y’know I got off the train and followed a mis-signposted road and got a bit lost. And came in to discover that whilst I received a receipt the conference organizers didn’t receive proof that I’d paid and had a huge drama trying to connect to the internet… and ended up sleeping through the afternoon’s sessions.

But that feeling hasn’t left me. Right now, is just fine. And I like travelling chaotically because it is always fine. I challenge myself – and then I make it work. I have been to a lot of places, and experienced a lot of awesome things. My last passport had stamps or visas on nearly every page and my new one has extra pages – it represents the possibilities – the places I’ll go, the adventures I’ll have. In all the stress and the chaos and the frustration with constantly packing-or-unpacking, and living in the same few outfits because honestly I can’t remember what else is in my closet it all became not-fun anymore. And people would say, “Oh Switzerland? You’re so lucky!” And I would look on in bewilderment because it felt like all I was seeing was airports and hotels and how is it lucky to go to a ski resort and not ski?

I’m ready – so ready – for this period of intense jittering about to end. And frustrated, by the idea that I keep seeing that says, “you’re doing what you need to do, you are who you need to be” because sometimes it’s time to change and it doesn’t really matter if someone else thinks my life is glamourous or exciting if I feel like I’m losing my mind.

But this moment, this moment is fine.

I love books, I read a lot – even more now I have my Kindle (Amazon), and it seems like I mange to read the books that contain the message I need to hear. Recently, there have been two. The Power of Now, and Goal-Free Living (both Amazon).

I was frustrated by The Power of Now. It was too fuzzy and spiritual for me to take some parts of it seriously, although I much enjoyed the quote: “I have had three zen masters, all of them cats”. But I did get some things out of it.
1. To be present, just focus on whatever it is you’re doing right now. I find this calming. Instead of running from one place to another thinking about what I’m grabbing and where I’m going, I’m just walking.
2. You are not your life situation.
3. I was also interested by the mind-creation of drama, although I don’t have a concrete conclusion I’m drawing from that.
Goal free living is a short, easy, but mind opening read. I really recommend it (and thanks to Rachelle for recommending it to me!) The eight principles of goal-free living are:
1. Use a compass, not a map
2. Trust that you are never lost
3. Remember that opportunity knocks often, but sometimes softly
4. Want what you have
5. Seek out adventure
6. Become a people magnet
7. Embrace your limits
8. Remain detached
Anyway, after all of this – I’ve learned in the midst of chaos, in the midst of change, I need to take a deep breath and appreciate right now, whatever it contains. I hope right now is looking good to you, too.
January 25, 2011