Jet Lag

Thanks to jet lag, I've been up since the wee hours of the morning, reading blogs, working, thinking about life, and enjoying my cutie patootie Corgi, who I just picked up last night.

My life on the road seems unusual by some standards. I'm an itinerant NGO worker, in transit, moving.

When I was traveling, I read The Cruelest Journey, Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu in parallel with my own trip to Timbuktu. Why do I travel? I fear a stagnant life. I love new experiences. The author of this book says, "I want the world to always be offering me the new, the grace of the unfamiliar." That sums it up for me. When I'm traveling, I am offered hundreds, myriads of new experiences.

In Mali, the Tuaregs I was with said we must stop in a small town to see an elder, an advisor, who gives them counsel. He said to me, "You must have something to learn here with so long a journey." There is something to learn everywhere--of generosity and poverty, of the many ways one can live life, of things taken for granted, of the familiar and unfamiliar. Of life.