Birthdays

“Hand me the wine and the dice,
I want my carnival now,
While I have thirst and lust for living.”

-Aspects of Love, A.L. Webber

Ah, birthdays.  I mean, it’s not like I don’t spend a couple of minutes out of every day already being reminded of all the goals I’ve fallen short of (still no world domination!?), but birthday time tis for me, as I imagine it is for most people, the season of extra heavy contemplation.  Somehow tied into the all the progress check-ins and self-accomplishment bashing I participate in, I have developed a kind of (actually very serious) competition with…me. The continuous quest to outdo oneself:  healthy or hazardly?

This year I briefly set myself up in competition with me a year ago, and decided I needed to do something more exciting, just to show Me From A Year Ago who’s boss.  Last year, as you may recall, I went volcano boarding in Nicaragua.  That sounds pretty badass, right? A few things:

1)    My board broke pretty much right after takeoff.  I inched slowly down most of the volcano, pushing myself along until I finally gave up and walked down the rest of the way, broken board in hand.  If memory serves, my first words upon reaching the bottom were, “Well, that sucked.”

2)    The actual wiiiildest part celebrating my 30th birthday was simply carrying on like a 20 year old.  And this was fun, if a bit juvenile.

3)    What does that actually leave me to compete with?  An experience that sounds cool on paper but was a bit wah-wah in reality, or hoping to top a few days of  mojitos and immature abandon?  Neither of those things are really worthy of my aspiration.

While in competition mode, my first thought was to go shark diving in South Africa.  But after some reflection on the above and a quick tally of my available resources, I realized this was something for another day.  A good competitor sees his weak opponent clearly through the disorienting cloud of bravado.  The real challenge is not one-upping yourself, it’s learning how to engage the world in something other than a daily win/lose contest with the valuation of your self-worth on the line.  Accepting and embarking on any activity or train of thought that you find challenging is enough.  Stepping out of this rivalry, I found that what I really wanted was to go somewhere new, kind of quiet, and mountainous with access to the outdoors.  I was still feeling Africa, a part of the world I really should be more familiar with by now.  I set my sights on Accra, but as the date grew closer the flights started to fill up.  I changed the destination to Dakar.  The night before I left, it became clear that I would be shut out of virtually all flights to anywhere in Africa.  Time for another change of plans.

I’ve romanticized Colombia for a long time, so it might sound contradictory to you to learn that the result of this idealization was deliberate avoidance.  Like, there was so much riding on it, so much I wanted to do there, that I simply could not go at all unless I was prepared to accomplish it.  That’s silly!  How could I even know what was possible there unless I’d seen it?  I’ve also been a little slow to explore South America on the whole because a part of me is still intent on doing a big, extensive trip through the whole content with a car and a hammock one day.  Or maybe just the hammock.  Another idealized version of something I’ve never done that was keeping me from doing something I wanted to do.  The flights looked good, the weather looked warm; I decided to ignore the voices in my head demanding I celebrate birthdays in progressively more extreme and ultimately unsustainable ways and got on the plane. Arriba!

A lot of the great things I’d heard about Colombia were from Colombian co-workers.  These guys still have family there and go back to visit regularly.  In fact, I couldn’t help but notice that my friend Steve was at the time there doing just that.  I sent him a message asking for advice.  My thought was to stay in Bogota for the week, maybe taking little daytrips around, but he convinced me to make my way out towards a town called Salento if I was looking for a slower pace.  A quick google image search of Salento quickly convinced me he was right.  NEW PLAN.

I’ll get into the itinerary and all the usual problems I encountered along the way (spoiler alert: more sleeping in airports) next time.  I guess for today I just wanted to leave you with a semi-contrived analogy:

Don’t romanticize who you want to be to the point that you scare yourself off from doing the work to get there.  Don’t become overwhelmed.  If you do become overwhelmed, keep moving with intention, however slowly.  Keep getting up.  The world will spin regardless, your cells will die and regenerate, time marches boldly and unconditionally forward, with or without your approval.  My own sliver of personal research suggests that life may in fact be complete chaos shrouded in oblivion at every level- yay!-but I can tell you this with certainty:  make your own moves and it won’t feel like it so much.