2022, the year of utmost chaos, is almost done and as much as I wish the 31st of Dec marked the end of something other than the Gregorian calendar, part of me, many parts, doesn’t really want that because it’s been a year of massive change, learning and a rapidly expanding skillset in relating to riding waves of tumultuousness – a skill that I could use more of, probably forever, as one of the main realisations was/is that tumult is a guarantee if you wish to live in the real world, engaging with real people. I’m in Australia right now, it’s been 3 years since my last visit and its been a revelation re the hermitic life I was leading for many years, probably years before moving to Canada in June 2019. It’s easy to ignore things that aren’t tangible/available and given Covid’s and my own embargos on travel, friends and family i’d reached new levels of forgetting.
It’s time to forget the forgetting in order to remember shit that really matters. 3 years didn’t seem like a long time but coming back and seeing my extended family and homies it’s clearly a gargantuan epoch. That previous statement is an indulgence in naivety, especially considering the years I was on the road and based in Brisbane – just being away for a few months had me feeling like I was on a totally different trajectory to the people I was hanging with before heading off, the explorer’s curse, and not even that the path was better, towards the end of that era – when I was getting tired of the road life – I felt I was falling behind.
Luckily I’m writing this 5 days before the new year because this is not to serve as a resolution, there’s no resolving of many of my experiences this year. It’s been riddled with tragedy, unwanted emotions and unimaginable breeds of chaos, hence why half of my posts this year have had chaos in the title and all of the have chaos in the context. Timing isn’t ideal, timing of sub-ideal things is probably ever ideal, but I can only say that without hindsight, cuz I’m hoping 2023 will be me looking back thinking something along the lines of thank fuck and also how good it is to rip 4 bandaids off at once. I say 4, i struggle to identify even just 1, but the analogy still stands.
I’m looking forward to a lot, mostly getting back on my bike after developing tendonitis in both my knees at once, in September. I’m looking forward to moving towards goals I’ve had parked for years, parked because I’d basically parked my self and I’m excited to ignore qualms by committing to the search for more submersion in other things I love – water, for example, the main example probably, a huge challenge living in Vancouver where the water hurts, but as I can travel again I can dip down to central America etc. I’ve dived the last 3 days here in QLD and yes it certainly rivals my love for multi-day riding, a great element of that is that extreme snorkelling is much easier on the body than riding up mountains for 15 hours a day. Both have benefits, and it’s maybe more likely I’ll die in the water, but I don’t feel that is the case given the remarkable ability for shit drivers to hold drivers licences.
