The countdown begins

I just returned from a vacation in Galveston with my family and will now begin my preparations for South Africa in earnest.  Expect to see more regular posts in the coming weeks, which will hopefully continue once I am in Africa, depending on my internet access.  I have already begun reading “Long Walk to Freedom”, Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, and plan to read several more titles relating to South Africa to give myself some background on what will be my home for the next two years.  My aunt here in Huntsville has given me “The Covenant” by James Michener and a lady in a Galveston bookshop recommended “Cry, the Beloved Country” as well.  If anyone has any other recommendations, by all means, share them. 

 

The purpose of this blog is to relate my experiences during this next two years, assuring my mother that I am still alive and well, while perhaps also allowing others to live vicariously through my words.  I do not mean for my posts to be a mere personal diary of thoughts and emotions.  However, as I begin this whole process, I cannot help but express the sentiment of how much I feel there is to be experienced in this world and accomplished in this life.  Such sentiment is one of the main reasons why I quit my corporate job to pursue an assignment that offers nothing in salary but hopefully everything in experiences.   

Every day I read or hear of someone who is traveling across Scandinavia after having spent a year in Spain, or hitchhiking across the Australian outback, or climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.  I cannot come across these stories without the feeling that I too should and must experience these things.  I am continually reminded of how much I want to do and how much of it I have not done.  There is so much I want to accomplish and yet so little time, and despite my best efforts so far, I am constantly haunted by the feeling that I am missing out on all that life can be.  The thought that scares me the most and that sits in the back of my mind most days is that I will get to the end of my time here on Earth and feel that I did not live my life to the fullest, that I left something on the table and did not squeeze every drop out of existence that there is to be taken. 

 

Such emotion was further triggered as I browsed the aforementioned bookshop in Galveston today.  Bookshops are one of the places I feel most at home.  Even when I have no intention of buying anything, I absolutely love browsing through the shelves, looking at the various titles and subjects, and feeling the sheer possibility of the knowledge and literature there is to be consumed.  Yet at the same time amidst this possibility, there resides an anxiety that there is so much to be read and simply not enough time in which to read it.

In short, whether it be in travel, reading, or really life, in general, I want to do it all.  Existence is defined by the wonder of knowing there is always another adventure, but dampened by the understanding that our time is finite and we can only do so much.  My wish is that my life simply be one in which I did the best that I could, doing as much as I could, learning as much as I could, and appreciating and loving it as much as I could.  May my time in South Africa be a step towards the fulfillment of this wish.