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Instant Gratification Takes To Long. It took me 20 years to become an overnight success

After spending 8 months a year for the last 10 years living out of a suitcase, it is easy to reflect on the value of thoughtful travel. I call it "Taking Yourself With You". There is no such thing as work-life-vacation balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. One rarely falls in love with people without being equally attracted to what is interestingly wrong with them.

Travel, at its best is creative destruction. In the wisdom of the moment,the power of a new language, food and culture and people are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be lived.

The whole exercise has to be one of reconciliation.Lowering, removing or shattering the walls of misunderstanding which unduly separate we human beings, one from another. It's not so much about being understood as understanding. A lot of times, it's not you it's U.S. winning  the geographic lottery being horn in the USA. Why go anywhere else, eh?

The Hunt For Happy- is the longing for repetition.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling our stories from the same facts. Pleasure is not happiness but the joy I have extracted from trips depends more on the mindset I travel with than on the destination I travel to. I don 't want to tell anyone where they ought to travel, but only how and why.

 My daughter Truddie recently came back from SE Asia. Dont follow my advice I told her. Follow my example. I am glad she is doing just that. Already booked another trip with her husband Joe in May for elsewhere.

In SE Asia in The early 90's

My dream-I haven’t been everywhere, but it is on my list, reveals I never quite get 'over' this travel-thing : it's all still in there somewhere. You have to be like someone to envy them- when you can't relate to somebody, you can’t 't envy them. Not too many people are doing what I’m doing. There is a randomness of #winning and losing, not any justice to it or divine right.. People make my experience vital-That's the mark of a good trip. I never heard a travel agent ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we want to go. Instead of bringing back 3000 refrigerator magnets, I return from my trips with a collection of small but life-enhancing/ extending thoughts...such as(read caption below)

The difference between me and this Ferrari  is that I know I am not a Ferrari "Stuff" is an identity crisis. We are not our Stuff.

Empathy and Sympathy-A Big Distinction

FADE IN: Empathy: I see someone zoom past me in a tricked out  Ferrari  today—He  is  not  greedy or flashy  but  “incredibly vulnerable and in need of love”  I know because I drove one in Monaco. I was that guy.

At home we don't usually encounter our true and best  selves. 

The Things You Own End Up Owning You---but beds last longer than marriages

For instance, Sympathy: I see bitterness, the silent disease (mostly) of  domestic relationships take its toll---the habits and confinement of the ordinary, commuter  world where, once home, the furniture insists that we cannot change because it doesn't and debt keeps us tethered  and stuck to the mundane and profound.I feel that pain, and have an infinite(compassionate) smile for anyone who is grinding it out  because I embrace(d) that ennui  and burn(ed) it as fuel for my travels.  That  resignation is  like a spot on your shirt that never comes out-So Don't  just change your mind, change your shirt.

Rule of thumb is if I am not  embarrassed enough  by who I was and what I did  last year, I  probably am not learning enough!

Some Nostalgia- Pedaling Thoughts

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

MY LIFE, BASED ON A TRUE STORY is downright paranormal. How the hell did I get here? Whatever talent I possess(ed)  is on loan from some deity, some unimaginable source and force for some exquisite portion of  time, to be passed on when I am finished.

The most extraordinary aspects of my being didn't come from me. The spark(s) of epiphanies that I occasionally get are less about being a genius  and more about having a genie---Making  Wishes. Showing Up. Being T/Here.Fear is for folks who don't get out very much. Outdoors Is In!

Life's Change Agent

Don’t ask me to swallow the ocean.  I didn't do anything on my own--Serendipity and meaningful coincidences used to warp and distort my digital narcissism  into believing I had  everything to do with whatever was going on in my life, Yet one of the most  painful reconciliations  I had to  make after that sort of thinking is when reversals take place and  “the future just ain’t what it used to be”.  More than that, you can never plan the future by the past.

It’s hard to get back to back championships."The Sky's The Limit" vibe  is, paradoxically, problematic, in that it causes us to believe we can (and should) perpetually be succeeding more than we actually are, even if that hope is flatly unrealistic. Still it is in the AmeriCAN cultural DNA to be restless,and want to leave., and maintain a healthy but malignant optimism.

Those Who Do Not Move, Do Not Notice Their Chains

The ethos of mobility and individualism started when I become an idiot (a Greek word originally meaning non-citizen), not buying into the shared hallucination of mediocrity. You relax and lower your standards and question everything. You are no longer separate, isolated or alone. You are just like everyone else. The clock had  struck 13. What is deeply personal becomes  universal---this is the real internet and network---the collective unconsciousness.

15 lbs Lighter than last year!

Telling our own story is not something that we are  taught how to do. There  is a course called Life 101. The Earth school of hard knocks.Tuition is free, paid for with bad planning. Success is continued enthusiasm despite failure after failure; and nothing fails like excess.

Houston ,We have a Bunny!

The Earth school kills all of its students--It only ends once, everything else is just progress. Hopefully, you do things that get you out of your “jumping jack” default state of being-shopping and buying, and you go to the edges and profoundly  do your human homework.

The Invention Of The Ship Was Also The Invention Of The Shipwreck.

The word “blessing” actually comes from the French blessure, which means “wound.” So, a blessing always has that other side to it, My cruising obsession (this invisible wound) is like a private religion. It’s where the bulk of my spirit is actually invested. Yet I have been divinely compensated.The wisdom of this excess is that We die to the present tense
and are born again in future perfect the heroes of our own lives.Yet there is always the nostalgia, the homesickness for the East-West Coasts:

Putting the He in Hero, all action/adventure films have the same moral: Perseverance pays. Of all the things I am not very content at doing,living on land is the most outstanding. I was an armchair sea dog, growing up on LAWNGUYLAND(L.I.) New York, dreaming of going places, but I never stepped foot even in a motor boat, never started and 
Therefore never failed.

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, I couldn't do it in cities where I taught English like New York or Los Angeles, Paris or Tokyo 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."


Sea Change
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.

Let The Orinoco Flow--There is no doubt about it, the exhilarating state of mind that travel can evoke, when everything seems suddenly fresh, vivid, intensely interesting, and memorable

Despite the undoubted camaraderie, the laughs, the jollies and the sense of tribalism that attends any cruising project, the profession remains a notoriously lonely one. Friendships are intense but brief; when the gig ends or the curtain runs down, you can soon find yourself back home staring at your cell phone and wondering if any of it really happened. Memories are short, time moves on, fame is transitory.

Nothing fails like excess- 6 times around the world does build confidence- It's not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind everyday- in order to come to your senses.  It is a blessing:



6 Laps Around The World DOES Build Confidence, ie, trusting yourself, only then can you begin to live.

You can teach an old DOGma new tricks. 

 Neurons  that wire together fire together. I am not seeking a meaning to life, but the experience of being ALIVE. I am  longer hard-wired  per se for  cruise ships. My brain is plastic. The hunt for HAPPY is repetition. I enjoy the navel gazing concussions, the  Lakota-style sweat lodge ceremonies, the power of NEW and the power of NOW. That will never change.Life Extension: The "prescription" for  my happiness. I'm not going to the doctor or the mall, I'm  going on a trip.





Fade IN:  Leaving a ritual and habit of ordinary living,  I embarked  on an unplanned trip and became The  Accidental Sailor.  
For reasons of necessity rather than a sense of innate wanderlust, I am at sea because it gives  me something to do and a place to be. Magnetized and full of charisma, I always managed to stay on course, without realizing it. Sometimes I quip---Success at sea is continued enthusiasm despite failure after failure, because there are so many variables, but in the end, you don't quit jobs, you quit people. FunEmployment  has a limited lifespan. 

Never heard of FunEmployment? It's the person who quits his job or takes advantage of being out of a "job" to have the time of their life. Instead of punching a clock, you head for the beach. In my case, the high seas. 2012

2009

20,000 Leagues Into My Brain

Call it faith! A passion for the possible. I am full of it, and shooting from the hip that is to say, having an adventure is something more but nothing less than bad planning. Yet, if I had to plan it all, I probably wouldn't have done it.

I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much I love being at sea. Maybe what matters is who I am when I’m  doing it. I’m my best self. 

  Character is doing what’s right when no one is looking. All of ones problems come from the inability to spend time quietly alone in ones "room". There is a lot of alone time.

cOPENhagen

As much as I detest   the travel (sometimes) —I love the writing and the introspection—the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, itinerary or culture, and comparing it to my state of mind at that moment , stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remains in neat, terse blog posts, building a solid foundation with the bricks that these ports of call and at sea have thrown at me.

The winds of grace always blow for us  but you have to raise your sails and just go. 

Any port in a storm won't do. You need to be content with the weather of  the day-to-day-The whole secret  is to have NO FEAR. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Written on the gates of hell is abandon all hope" Written in the heart and mind of a Buddha " reject all help"  Only then  are you freed.

The cure for anything is salt water -  sweat, tears, or the sea....

 Sure living at sea is hours of boredom tinged with moments of hysteria- sometimes the waters are so rough you get sea sick, but I never found these as excuses to remain ashore except for biking…and it’s lonely at times, but I call that solitude. Freedom is not free but it is not for sale and can't be purchased in a 7 day cruise. Sure it's fun- all the food and drink and music and noise; but pleasure is not  happiness. Happiness is balance and following your bliss, and connecting with the divine. The  sea is the place I house  my soul and access my higher self.