On Layovers and Intentions

Porch parties like this, where the community gathers to share music and celebration, are just one of many reasons that Kitchener-Waterloo is a place I’m happy to call home.

As of four weeks ago, and until the end of December, I’m home in Waterloo with a fixed address and a community that warms my heart when it crosses my mind. After that, at least 8 months of next year will be spent traveling, mostly overseas. A good friend of mine had used the term layover for these periods in her life. Others have said that it’s nice to take a break for a while. While I agree with the sentiment of both terms, I noticed that they didn’t completely capture my thoughts and intentions surrounding this time home. Am I here to take a break, or to be paused patiently before the next “big travel” begins? To an extent, both of those ideas are true. Surely, however, there must be a more comprehensive way to frame my time, in order to intentionally bundle in some more thoughts and values I’d like to live by.

Life simplifies on smaller time scales. I notice how much easier it is to think and act when I view my life as a collection of phases, not fully recognizing that all of my actions, no matter the size, will have a permanent effect on the future. People may take short contract jobs, move cities for a year to develop a skill, decide to travel for some time, or do a host of activities that have relatively well defined end dates. The notion of phases allow for a sort of compartmentalized decision making process, where there’s little requirement to relate short term goals to the long term values that we all might hope ourselves to live by.  I’ve been (and still am) in this mindset, to varying degrees, and it certainly allows for quicker decisions and subsequent actions. However, it is exactly within this mindset that I find myself straying from the values that I believe to be important in living a meaningful life, as they aren’t as often required to be considered with a short term mindset. In addition, as I develop my own ethos, it becomes easy to forget about new values that were seemingly so important in a previous phase of my life.

This blog post is an attempt to stitch together phases of my life in order to not leave any of the value of my past behind. Below are just a few beliefs and values that, to varying degrees, I have refined in the last six months of my life while on the road. I hope to carry these new ideas into my present to give me a better set of guiding principles to inform my choices.

Trust in Others

Being in explicit positions of need many times this summer, it became somewhat of a requirement to trust that other people were genuine in their attempts to help. After enough of these experiences, my baseline position towards, say, hitchhiking drivers, was noticeably shifted towards an initial position of trust. There’s a fine line somewhere between trust and naivety, but I believe there’s much to be gained if even we overshoot and end up being a little too optimistic about the nature of humankind and are let down occasionally. As I live a more comfortable life for the present time, my needs from others are less immediate. I don’t believe this changes the general notion of trust, however, that I can tend to forget. There’s great value in trusting in the general goodness of people, and I believe this value is worth cultivating regardless of how much we might think we don’t need to trust others.

New Experiences

For many, travel seems to bring about the desire for new experiences. On the road, people seem to be more willing and open to venture to new places, eat new foods, and engage in activities they’d never previously considered (this is exactly how I came to learn about dumpster diving). When traveling in new places, there’s less pressure to conform to preconceived notions of yourself, and there’s also less external requirement on how you spend your time, as contrasted with, say, a life at home with a full time job. New experiences require us to act without predefined responses that we create and refine for the reoccurring parts of our life – they encourage us to act based on our more fundamental beliefs, at which point we learn more about ourselves and the beliefs we hold. While we will likely act, to some degree, based on the behaviour of those around us, this mental scramble to make sense of our experience in real time is a wonderful way to cultivate self awareness. The more varied the experience, the less commonality we share with our past experiences, and the deeper we must go within ourselves to reconcile our current actions with the rest of our lives. This is, in part, why the responsible use of consciousness altering drugs can be wonderful tools for self awareness cultivation. When living in a fixed location, where new experiences may not present themselves as often or to such extremes, I’ll endeavour to be mindful about new experiences and pursue them passionately, where possible.

Valuing Discomfort

I can’t count the times in the last six months that I’ve deeply appreciated a real, actual bed, or a warm shower. This is likely a known experience for many, after returning from a long day outside or sleeping in a crowded space and returning home a day or two after. These are simple examples, but they illustrate the concept that I seem to become desensitized to my comforts within relatively short order, try as I might to rationally remind myself to be grateful. Yes, I know there are people around the world that don’t eat as well as I, or don’t sleep on comfy beds, but empathy is difficult to obtain rationally. Experiencing discomfort, whether it be physical or emotional, gives not only empathy for others experiencing the same, but gives our own mind a broader range of experience in which the beds feel softer, the pain feels more painful, and the happiness feels happier. The acute satisfaction of comfort soon dulls, and without a reminder of the other side of that spectrum, I feel an increasing disconnect from the full appreciations I know are possible. This doesn’t mean I’ll be sacrificing my own comforts given every opportunity, but when they seem to be taken for granted, intentionally moving away from them might be a valuable decision for a short time. In a non-traveling context, this could mean camping outdoors, fasting, pursuing emotional pains, or whatever else seems relevant given the context.