33
Me and Jesus in our 33rd year
It was my 33rd birthday today.
I celebrated only very humbly, we didn’t even make a birthday party.
Last year, I was “celebrating” my birthday in Allahabad, during Maha Kumbha Mela Festivals, by lying in bed in fever and visiting toilet 10 times a day, after I caught some infection from those 50 000 000 Indians around me in Maha Kumbh Mela. In the crowd of 50 millions, I was completely alone.
This time, I was with 2 people: Irene and Olga. Wow, I made 2 friends during the whole year! :-DDD
I remember that year ago I had written that 2013 would better be a good year, because next year I would enter Christ years. When he was 33 years old, Jesus saved the mankind, and that’s a benchmark which is hard to beat.
Well, it was a good year. It was a pretty fucking GOOD YEAR!
I’m sorry for the mankind, that I haven’t managed to save it, but at least I saved myself.
So I’m 33 now. Interesting.
My new motto: DWJWD!
I will use this opportunity to write few lines about obsessive long term traveling.
Some of you probably ask: how is it to travel for so long to so many places? I’m 33 and I visited almost 50 countries. Since 2003 I’ve lived in USA (4 months), in Portugal (6 months), in Czech Republic, although not really traveling (2 years), on the road in USA (5 months), tripping through Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia (5 months) and now I spend 5 months in India/Sri Lanka/Nepal, 7 months in Australia and 2 months in Indonesia.
I will tell you how it is:
Everything mixes. Into gigantic cocktail of images and emotions. It’s like living in an endless stream of deja vu. Everything reminds you of everything and anything reminds you of anything. And it all seems like 100 years. Lack of routine makes every day special, and creates new and new memories, and due to limitations of your brain, the old memories are erased and fade away at alarming pace. And all that remains is an aftertaste of all those places and faces.
And there’s one more important consequence. It’s hard to get shocked or deeply impressed. I see many “travelers-beginners” and their fascination by every little stupid thing they see. “That is amazing!” they say, and deep inside me a voice responds: “What? This is amazing? You haven’t seen anything yet, brother!”. To put it simply, you get used to traveling and it’s hard to find superlatives. But it’s not all bad. Because you learn not to look for superlatives. It’s the lack of routine, the profound escape from the rat-race that you learn to appreciate. It’s about multitude of experiences, not about few triumphant experiences. It language of mathematics, my excitement from a new place might be just 25 compared to 100 of a traveler-beginner, but 25 x 1 000 is still 25 times more than 100 x 10. I love my life. And I love the easiness with which I travel. Because while I may not get a kick of every place I visit, all the travel experience I have gained, completely eliminates fear of traveling or fear of discomfort or any other limitations of our minds. I came, I saw, I travelled. I do love my life. But I often remember the full-on excitement of our family trip to Yugoslavia, when I was a small child, and the smell of salty air coming from the sea and the smell of pines of Adriatic coast and the exhilarating excitement of seeing the blueness of the sea on the horizon through the front window of the car. That pure, heart-pumping, childish amazement shall not ever be repeated…
While we have dreams, we can’t wait to finally turn them into reality, and when the reality strikes, we miss the anticipation of the magic that kept our dreams so beautiful.
In the days of innocence, we yearn for experience –and once we get the experience we lament the lost innocence.
But that’s OK, that the way it has to be, and we need to carry on, yearning and lamenting. As long as we yearn and lament we are alive! I’m 33, I’m still alive.
