Expectation is a strange idea. I leave Morocco tomorrow for Egypt, and I don’t expect anything. I have a family here, and a routine, and I am happy. And I will go to Egypt and have friends there, and a routine, and be happy.
I guess that adventures are not defined so much by pilgrimage to a place as by the act of traveling itself. The point–right now, in the place I am at, shaped as I have been by the past three months of travel–is simply to keep moving forward, to keep finding new places in the world where I can feel the normal rhythms of my life in a thousand different places, fall head over heels and then let go, learn to recognize the limitations of space and time–and be comforted by these things.
I will miss my family here, and I am excited to begin regular university classes again. But I am neither anxious nor assured, giddy nor depressed. I am not full of anticipation or trepidation. I am not in this for the pictures or the staged cultural experiences or the glossy grad-school-application essay topics. So it remains to be solved–What am I, and what am I doing here? My answers are changing.
I am here for the hard times and trivial times and good times and strange times and little moments in time when I am in love with the world and its sunsets. I am here to wake up and breathe and go about my day, and I am here to do it all on the other side of the planet, in a different language, with people I have never met, because I have this idea that something, everything, will make sense then. That I will understand what it means to exist in a place.
What am I? I guess I am going.
