A Hiatus from Wayfaring

After more than three months of an itinerant lifestyle, I have finally taken a small break to visit a familiar place. That doesn't mean I have gone back home or settled for something. No, not yet. After a defining phase of three months during which I was on the road covering various places in Asia, I am back in Singapore on one of my conclusive visits here. I realized (yet again) that I didn't and ain't going to miss this place much. It's exceedingly dull. Most of the human effervescence has been lost in the miasma of materialism.

Localities in Asia are amazing - they pack so much energy in a very complicated and unpredictable manner. There's tons of potential and scores of illogical or irrational things happening around (Taiwan and Korea are exceptions to the latter part). For now I have found my sweet spot in Asia - a place which is aesthetically pleasant and serves most of my purposes well. It's Taiwan. I will be spending a good deal of time there - exploring, volunteering, meeting people and improving Mandarin among the many things I will do here.

I am visibly thinner and darker. I am poorer. I am surer of a few things in life. A lot of people have said how skinny I have become. I hate it - I don't think I will ever compromise my health for anything else I like.

I couldn't make breakthroughs in my fitness - before I set out traveling, I thought I would become a faster runner and learn a few more parkour skills. Thanks to a nasty shoulder injury I found it very hard just to maintain my fitness levels. Throughout my trip, fitness-wise I was only running and doing push-ups. Any other workout caused pain in my gammy shoulder. The last three utterly slothful weeks saw me losing most of my muscle weight bringing me to where I am right now. It's very hard to work out when you are staying in a dorm.

I did make a breakthrough in learning Mandarin though. I had no intentions of learning how to read Mandarin characters - their convoluted appearance coupled with a seemingly endless number of characters made it an overwhelming task. But it happened! I began to look at a few characters around me and noticed recurring patterns (simple radicals, I realized). I learnt a few basic characters (~30). It helped me understand a few more characters. Then the learning process began to work like a snowball effect. Currently my snowball of Chinese characters is pretty small - I can recognize around a hundred characters. But with a little more systematic approach and a little effort I can enrich my repertoire of these bad-ass characters. At least I can think of such a possibility now. And my spoken Mandarin is a lot better.

Career-wise I am pretty sure what to do. And the best part is all these months of traveling and meeting people across diverse backgrounds and situations have given me a strong confidence. The future looks promising, not scary. I relish the prospects of empowerment and freedom in my uncertainty. The latent fear of failure hardly bothers me. 

I experienced highs and lows while traveling. But the undue stress which was scraping my heart and soul each day of my life is gone. There are seldom bouts of loneliness when I feel extremely down, unwanted or purposeless. There's not much I can do about it. A quick intense workout calms down my senses and works like a temporary reprieve.

I can speak a lot about how much I have learnt and changed during all these months of traveling. I will save most of it for later posts. I will continue traveling, but the next leg of journey will be a lot more about experimentation. When I say experimentation, I mean it in various aspects of life - career, way of living. societal interactions and new ideas. I will write about it if and when I get somewhere interesting.

Right now I am looking forward to my next trip. 

(A little bit of background)