#60: "Time To Think"

Well, I'm back from my trip to London. We all survived, no one got hurt/arrested, and we even made it on to the TV if you kinda squint and you know what color jacket I was wearing. It was a great result, and it was nice to get back to a city that I so enjoy.

In years past when I traveled alone it was almost always by car. That 2001 Ford Focus ZX3 took me all over the country. It went to upstate New York, out to Detroit, to St. Louis, to Memphis and Nashville. It moved with me to Florida and Maine, but skipped living in DC for obvious reasons of parking. We were quite the pair.

Almost all of the trips I just listed were trips I made alone. Hours upon hours in the car staring at printed directions from Mapquest that were likely wrong but they were the best we had at the time. So much time that I quit carrying CDs in the car and bought what felt like at least a dozen cheap radio transmitters for my iPod but was actually closer to two or three as they were quite expensive at the time. I had to have something to listen to - I couldn't always find the NPR station - and there was no way I was going to spend all those hours lost in my own thoughts.

Or that's what I believed at the time. I did spend all those hours in my head. I talked to myself constantly, out loud, and often replied. I would speak to the radio as if it could hear me. I sang sometimes, but interestingly I'm not much of a car belter. I tried to record one voice memo, failed miserably, and still have the failure on my phone today. Yet it was in these long hauls that I spent time thinking - both in general and about such minutiae that it likely contributed to some of the memories that I'll never be able to forget.

I am still haunted by some of those things all these years later, though I'm glad I had the time to give them serious thought. On the brighter side I was able to better come to the ability to describe how I feel about the world, politics, the arts, music, beer, women, and many others. Traveling alone gives you the opportunity to reflect, and if you can let go just long enough it will take you to places that you hadn't remembered in decades. In that letting go you can either put things to bed, allow them to bubble to the surface, or simply reach out a fingertip, touch them briefly, and let them fade back into nothingness.

I wasn't able to let go much this past trip when I was alone. I was too concerned with why the remote in my hotel room was such garbage, or why the breakfasts were so boring, or how to make my feet hurt less. I never took a moment to just watch the world go by, and to be perfectly honest, I'm OK with that.

I've got a few days to myself here while the fam is in Florida. I've already spent some time thinking about yesterday's school shooting (I hope we see gun control before I'm dead), and I've thought about this letter and getting back on track after missing two letters this week. Maybe I'll keep thinking the whole time. Maybe I'll just watch the world go by.