One day my life will flash before my eyes. I am making sure it’s worth watching. My life hasn't gotten better by chance; it’s gotten better by change. By changing nothing, nothing changes. When in doubt, I always have chosen change. All these changes, however, were preceded by chaos, and the bridges I burned, have lit the way.Yet, at what point is choice--the watermark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish--becomes a point of diminishing returns, a "problem" instead of a solution---That is the paradox of choice.
There is no YES, in yesterday, and when you are sailing, you are what you are right there and then. My bizarre travel plans have been dancing lessons from God. As soon as anyone starts telling me to be realistic, I cross that person off my invitation list. We are still friendly but no longer friends because they don’t get IT that if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space.
There is wise and other wise--When my left brain is too good at telling my right brain what to do, I am a normal man, adapting to the world; otherwise I am trying to adapt the world to myself. So all my progress depends on being a paranormal man. After all, “normal” is the setting on a washing machine-you know the spin cycle-same old, been there done that.Para normal, on the other hand,is an art rather than a science and can't be easily explained or measured.
The test to find whether my Hero’s Journey on earth is finished is simple--If I’m alive, it isn't. Remembering this is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking I have something to lose.. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
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That was Zen (Angkor Wat).
This Is Now (St Marteen)
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The joy in the freedom of losing everything!
Every day you have to go out of your mind in order to come to your senses. Furthermore a fool, who persists in his folly, becomes either wise or other wise.
It has never been about resources, but more about resourcefulness.We're never too poor to buy our freedom. In fact, we are all “time millionaires ”and when we who choose to "spend" this commodity, the less we put a cash value on travel, and the less we think that money is what we need to have an adventure and live, and the less we associate money with life in general.
Whoever put that thought virus or meme in my head--- the idea that my personal freedom was for sale, something I had to purchase, and that travelling took a lot of money was wrong. There is nothing more satisfying than saying---I TOLD YOU SO.
I’m living my dream of PT-Permanent Travel, also known as "Mini Retirements". I haven’t been everywhere, but it is on my list. As I document this adventure, this a round-the-world travelogue, I say to myself "Roam Sweet Roam". and
Jai Ho!
Home is not where my heart is but where my computer is-
I remain a digital nomad, where Anywhere becomes @nyware, location neutral, as there is no such thing as a bad piece of real estate when you use technology and social media. Sailing in The Caribbean Ocean----I am in the middle of nowhere, but the center of everything, thanks to a reliable high speed Internet connection. I am doing pretty much everything I would do in the USA, only with the economies of scale, at a less greater cost. Consequently, I call home a feeling not a place-I’ve never confused a street address for where I actually lived. My destinations have never been places , but new way of seeing things: the journeys themselves have been the destinations.
My life according to Bob Dylan Lyrics-Like A Rolling Stone and Quinn The Eskimo
Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone?
AND
Everybody's building ships and boatsSome are building monuments, Others jotting down notesEverybody's in despair, every girl and boy, But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here, Everybody's gonna jump for joy.
Come on without Come on within You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn
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Divine Compensation
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Failure IS the option,, a necessary ingredient for success.The culture of perfectionism, however, won't make room for the uncomfortable subject. The failure factory begins in that ponzi scheme called higher education aka, College Tuition---, a means to prey on the poor, instead of pulling people up by their boot straps.
Doing what we love is our sanity. It fills us with a powerful charisma, enabling us to produce new ideas and new projects. The law of gravity is not just a "belief." It is true whether or not you believe it. The Tao of Hotel @nyware are not just beliefs, either; they are descriptions of how my consciousness operates.
My cruising obsession is like a private religion, It’s where the bulk of my spirit is actually invested, for better or worse, and sometimes there are diminishing returns. The future is full of possibilities that you have to constantly shoot in the head-because if you want to sail around the world, you have to limit yourself to the vessel, and the terms and conditions of the contract.
6 times around the world builds confidence—it is the in to my sane, an organic field of energy that emerges from the deepest aspects of who I am.. It is the fulfillment of what God has created me to be and do, to make a dent in the user-friendly universe.
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you want! Brick walls are there for a reason - they let us prove how badly we want things!
It is awesome to dwell in the miraculous universe---A miracle is a shift in thinking-for me, it has never been about hoping or dreaming or winning the lottery, it’s been about faith-I’m full of it. Faith activates and doubt deactivate the Law of Divine Compensation.
I activate it with every loving thought. I deactivate it when I give more credence to the “reality” and power of the material world than to the reality and power of love. There is no point of diminishing returns or scarcity, or finite resources, in this freakonomics scenario.
Time spent in "ritual space", and getting in touch with your inner Wild Man Avatar renews mojo and a sense of life as a quest. Super Bowl Sunday--the high holy day of masculinity for AmeriCANS is one way to do it. So is cruising to exotic ports of call.
FADE IN: Enya's Caribbean Blue is a new-age speed bump in a 405- Los- Angry-Cars(LA) traffic jam. Sail Away, her other hit, is navel gazing concussion in a Lakota-style sweat lodge ceremony . Regular or extra crispy, take your pick.
"Everything you can imagine is real" ― Picasso
I write my own rules for nautical success: continued enthusiasm despite failure after failure.
Ship Happens-Success without fulfillment=failure So what, T
ry again. Fail again. Fail better.
Living on a ship, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It's not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.
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| Chief Reif and Crazy Horse |
After 11 ships, yes ELEVEN, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection-America. “It’s not about the money” is the lesser known, I don’t have a dream speech. Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who said “Money is life’s report card. I've seen this kind of "success" as a drug of choice.More than that, success without fulfillment, is failure, yet, this kind of failure is going to get your best material.
As An Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my can’t into cans and leveraged my dreams into serendipity a thousand unseen helping hands.
Money isn't the root of all evil, boredom is the root of all evil, a spiritual anorexia- the despairing refusal to be oneself.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you let go of the life you have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for you.
Being born in America is like being kidnapped and sold into slavery and the shared hallucination of running on the treadmill of consumption and materialism. It's a mask that eats up the face. It's also like winning the lottery, a currency, and I wanted to spend it well. Yet, we value material, we ignore emotions.
If I wanted to serve my country, I had to betray it. What was the blue chip idea worth betraying? What was the lie I told myself? The disease of more in a world of plenty where most of the developing world is starving. The lack of simplicity and the yearn for complexity was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain ( culture shock) to make a boring life interesting and re framing (Home is a feeling not a place) travel as a verb and not a noun. You have to DO it.--- A 1 man National geographic on that everywhere trip. The good, the bad and the ugly American- Why be difficult when you can be impossible--Hell was about to be other people,other cultures, other languages, and the National Anthem of Hell, was Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way".
I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler, and adapt, otherwise this journey would be Karaoke traveling, a cheap imitation of the best yet to come. Without risk, faith is an impossibility. My "leap of faith" to give up all things material was curiosity..The cure for my ennui and boredom was "Any place but here" and "I want to be surprised everyday".
There's nothing ethical about the work ethic on ships. I got paid in cash, visited nice places, had a hotel room and six all you can eat meals a day! If the passengers were behaving badly, there was always a new group every 7 or 14 days to keep my interest. Now that I didn't need Power Point to explain my job, how much was I worth now that I was no longer in the w2 world of 9 to 5. I was a time millionaire. It was going to be about resourcefulness and not resources.
Let the Orinoco Flow
There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. It is a known fact that when it's rainy or snowy, you have to merely think of an island paradise, and you are transported to that" Happy Place". A day-dream is as rich and real as anything on Earth. Picasso was right. All you can dream about can become real. I have shoveled snow and now I am shoveling sunshine. i always wanted to be in warm places in winter, and now All I want for Christmas is a sun tan.
Sail Away..
. from the North to the South, Ebudæ into Khartoum, from the deep sea of Clouds to the island of the moon, carry me on the waves to the lands I've never been, carry me on the waves to the lands I've never seen.
“Long, long journey through the darkness Long, long way to go But what are miles across the ocean To the heart that's coming home?” ― Enya
The Promised Land Is Right Where You Are
when you are following your bliss
My universe is made of stories, not atoms: land, air and sea travel and the power of now. If I wanted to be a multinational soul, and monetize my best asset,me, I couldn't do it in cities where I lived like New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo or Paris alone-I needed to get consecrated by sailing on the oceans.
It's a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know anyone; where, as Melville said,"God's one and only voice is Silence."
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The sceneries paint themselves. I'm just the middleman.
You can't create experiences like this, you undergo them. |
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If a man speaks in the forest and there are
no women around to hear it, is he still wrong? |
Living on a ship, might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria.
It's not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise. If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it, After all, success doesn't come to you, you go to it. It's not easy getting a gig on a ship.The Only Easy Day on board was Yesterday.
Ship/ Shift Happens
After 10 ships, yes TEN, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection-America.“It’s not about the money” is the lesser known, I don’t have a dream speech. The Greeks invented the idea of nemesis to show how any single virtue, stubbornly maintained gradually changes into a destructive vice. Having a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything has its moments, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places are ideas whose time has come.
Fire In The Belly
Steve Jobs said “Money is life’s report card, Sam Keen, "Nice gets you a C+ in life" I've seen this kind of "success" as a drug of choice.More than that, success without fulfillment, is failure, yet, this kind of failure is going to get your best material.As An Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my can’ts (no resources) into cans (resourcefulness) and leveraged my dreams (I haven't been everywhere but it is on my list) into serendipity a thousand unseen helping hands. As I stated in my Youtube channel bio--No matter how low the budget bar gets, I always manage to limbo my way under it. If you think about it, I am the Wilt Chamberlain of shoe-string travel.putting up #'s so unthinkable, mere normals will never, ever reach them.-300 ports in 38 months...
Money isn't the root of all evil, boredom is the root of all evil, a spiritual anorexia- the despairing refusal to be oneself.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you let go of the life you have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for you. I have come to love this new self, not by being a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly, and renewed with a sense of wonder about this. It’s only by becoming intimately acquainted with these narratives that we can begin to live consciously and, as the Sufi poet Rumi said, “unfold our own myth.”
We live in a storytelling economy, and gets paid for the stories we tell.
I too am constantly writing and re-writing my autobiography in this blog.(but I get paid in attention more than cash.).
Being born in America is like being kidnapped and sold into entrepreneurship
- the shared hallucination of running on the treadmill of consumption and materialism. It's a mask that eats up the face.
- ...It's also like winning the lottery, a currency, and I wanted to spend it well.Yet, we value material, we ignore emotions. If I wanted to serve my country, I had to betray it.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. See Video
What was the blue chip idea worth betraying? What was the lie I told myself? The disease of more in a world of plenty where most of the developing world is starving. The lack of simplicity and the yearn for complexity was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain ( culture shock) to make a boring life interesting and re framing (Home is a feeling not a place) travel as a verb and not a noun. You have to DO it.--- A 1 man National geographic on that everywhere trip.
The good, the bad and the ugly American- Why be difficult when you can be impossible--Hell was about to be other people,other cultures, other languages, and the National Anthem of Hell, was Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way". I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler, and adapt, otherwise this journey would be Karaoke traveling, a cheap imitation of the best yet to come.Without risk, faith is an impossibility. My "leap of faith" to give up all things material was curiosity.
The Power of NEW
The cure for my ennui and boredom was "Any place but here" and "I want to be surprised everyday". There's nothing ethical about the work ethic on ships. I got paid in cash, visited nice places, had a hotel room and six all you can eat meals a day! If the passengers were behaving badly, there was always a new group every 7 or 14 days to keep my interest.Now that I didn't need Power Point to explain my job, how much was I worth now that I was no longer in the w2 world of 9 to 5.
I am a time millionaire. It is going to be about resourcefulness and not resources.Who does not love the sea? The beach is a place of healing and joy. The salt cleanses us and the sun embraces us in its warmth. The ocean heals the heart, mind, and soul. life is different. Time doesn't move hour to hour but mood to moment.Yet, the sea has never been friendly to me. At most it has been the accomplice of my restlessness.So there is no cure for this curiosity.
TV is an eraser and Youtube and Blogger, a paint brush. My leap of faith to go on ships was recreation and re-creation and re-invention. There are second acts in American lives, and third and fourths.No Man Is An Island, yet after age 40, land is seldom seen and you can count your friends on one hand.I am an expat, yet not every country will do. I don't know why, some countries fill the gaps and others emphasize my expat-ness. In reality those that satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them."
Life’s a beach in an ocean of ennui is the take away from places like Fiji, Tahiti and the Maldives, even Alaska, aka, The Big Alone., It is when laziness finds respectability.
These "Islands" are extraordinary within their limits, but their limits are extraordinary. Yet if I do the math, an emotional algebra adds up to 1+1=infinity. It's a pristine place.This is no 9 to 5. You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. It is just a fraction of you. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating on a cruise ship, walking the painted line, where everything is nicely arranged--formal nights, shore excursions, shopping, bottled water.
When you’re perpetually cruising , you are what you are right there and then.
People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yes in yesterdays on the road.I know both sides because I am both sides: a tourist who doesn't know where I've been; a traveller who doesn't know where he's going. I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
I thought college was the longest vacation I ever took; but this Graduate School seamester is a kind of study abroad in Nomadic PursuitsI meet therefore I am- a multinational soul. I shrink therefore I am part of — and apart from American, European and Asian culture. and the countries I visit(ed) and live(d) in are as eclectic and restless as ports of call I "inhabit" for six hours or at most three daze.
Along with the displacement, and the associated "jet" lag" and culture shock, I am simply a fairly glib product of a movable feast, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly hybrid---a transit lounger, forever heading to the all "aboard" by 6PM gangway.The cult of the amateur wanderers is growing; global souls who haven't been everywhere but it is on their list; for whom home is a feeling, not a place in the soil but inside yourself. I am one of the privileged homeless. Is there a new kind of person being created by a new kind of life?
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| The elephant represents good luck, longevity and peace and strength; and mostly here in SE Asia, joy. A laughing Buddha riding an elephant with children on his lap is an excellent symbol for happiness and prosperity in the family. |
People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think this is what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive.~ The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
This world cruise has been one of the most rewarding forms of introspection. It is one stage of my “re-entry” in Hotel @nyware, continuing my extended break from Normal Life again to travel the world on board another cruise ship. I’m living my dream of PT-Permanent Travel, also known as "Mini Retirements". I haven’t been everywhere, but it is on my list.
As I document this adventure, this a round-the-world travelogue, I say to myself "Roam Sweet Roam". Home is not where my heart is but where my computer is- I remain a digital nomad, where Anywhere becomes @nyware, location neutral, as there is no such thing as a bad piece of real estate when you use technology and social media. As I make my way to Sri Lanka, in the middle of nowhere, but the center of everything, thanks to a reliable high speed Internet connection. I am doing pretty much everything I would do in the USA, only with the economies of scale, at a less greater cost.
Consequently, I call home a feeling not a place-I’ve never confused a street address for where I actually lived. My destinations have never been places , but new way of seeing things: the journeys themselves have been the destinations.
It has never been about resources, but more about resourcefulness.We're never too poor to buy our freedom.In fact, we are all “time millionaires ”and when we who choose to use this commodity, the less we put a cash value on travel, and the less we think that money is what we need to have an adventure and live, and the less we associate money with life in general.
Surely it is the right wish that draws us to the right places. Nothing of importance happens accidentally in our life.
Hotel @nyware is about choosing experiences and travel adventures over working away your life for material things.
It is different from being a tourist- different from buying a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren't looking into the mirror. Staging Authenticity and Encounters,The march of stupidity and the routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.When you have taken enough of these tours, however,each additional one you may ever take again, is both unbearable and trifling.
But beyond travel, Hotel @nyware is an outlook on life. Hotel @nyware is not a lifestyle, It's just an uncommon way of looking at life — a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, Long term travel is about being deliberate. It has nothing to do with demographics — how old you are , what is your belief system, how much money you make — and everything to do with attitude...and attitude affects altitude.
If I do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens. Yet I’m not simply seeking interesting surroundings, but I am continually interested in whatever surrounds me.
"I'm not really choosing between experiences,I am choosing between memories of experiences. Even when I think about future vacations, I don’t think of my future ports of call normally as experiences. I think of my future vacations as anticipated memories."
Hotel @nyware- Rooms Available
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