Free to Globe Trot

I now, for the first time in my life, own a passport. It arrived much faster than expected, and I have to give the post office and the government credit. I have been given 10 years of approval to travel about the world. Perhaps that is the easy part.

All of my domestic travel as of late makes me wonder how much desire I truly have to get on airplanes for even longer stretches of time, across big oceans. However, I'm sure plenty of desire would kick in once a trip was already planned and I could already taste the food, wine and cultural delicacies of, say, Rome or Paris.

For the longest time I felt you had to complete some intense traveling in order to write deep, interesting stuff. That certainly helps. However, I've come to realize the most intense traveling needs to happen inside of yourself...to reach reflective states of self-awareness and observations of what is around you in order to produce works of enduring substance.

And that takes something more valuable than a passport: time. The chief struggle of my life across the decades seems to be wanting and finding more time to write, and to write deep stuff.

Everyone's life and perspective is pretty interesting if its documentation is given enough time to cook, to burn away the cliches and assumptions and get to the unique beauty of the human experience...to get to one's place in the mythology, the spiritual yearning.