What seems like a very long time ago I spent a few hours in a cafe in Ushuaia, reading and writing and not doing very much. I had seen most of the town by then and I wasn’t feeling any pressure to do anything other than whatever I would like to do at that moment, an unusual state in modern adult life. And while sitting there and staring into space I got a sensation that I was seeing my own life from the air. Behind me was the one third to one half that I’ve already lived, and ahead was the one half to two thirds that I’ve still got to run. The view was hazy, the poor visual definition of a dream, but the landscape took the form of a narrow road through a winding country. On each side were rolling hills and streams and caves and chalky cliffs. Contained in the view were many of the thoughts that come to me in the early hours when sleep is distant and the world is silent – choices made and unmade, chances lost, unexpected moments of perfection, the weight of all there is to know and how little can be known.
This morning as I was on the long slow path from sleep to waking that view came to me again, though less clear than it was in the coffee shop. If I was to interpret the meaning of my own subconscious – a dangerous game to play – I would guess it was telling me that I have settled deep into things as they were before, and if I don’t make an effort to see a wider view, to remember what it was like in the vision from the air, I will be caught again in the quotidian currents. The great dreams, the great goals, will slip away unrealised, but worse, unreached for.
I have very much enjoyed being back this last two weeks. At some points during the trip I wanted to stay on the road forever, constantly moving, seeing new things, exploring, seeking, learning. But then in the last weeks the idea of home began to shift from the abstract to the real, as I may have already noted on these pages, and a gradual and unignorable desire to return began to build. I suppose that in some way you ‘target’ the total amount of time you have – if you intend to travel for six months you probably don’t get that feeling until five months or so have passed. But for me, the way it was, even if I had been planning to stay away for half a year I don’t think I could have. I would have had to return at least for a short while.
I’ve finished my first disorientating week at work, settling back into the routine there, finding that in the so-familiar confines of the office things have not changed, though I have changed at least a little. In a big company there are great rivers of ideas and ways of doing things that for long periods of time remain the same, only occasionally changing course with the great periods of upheaval and renewal. The day-to-day stuff is around the banks – given this, what’s that; with this constraint, what can we do with that. And the rivers have not changed in the short few months of my absence, and indeed to see a difference in their path and flow I need to look back years, over my entire career in Google.
I’ve been looking for an apartment and have found one near the river, a one-bed duplex with a curios design that means the living area on the lower floor is small and the upper area with the bedroom is outsize. It’s not a great use of space, in my humble non-professional opinion, as it prioritises aesthetics over humdrum concerns like where to put the bookshelves. But it looks very nice, and there is a metal spiral staircase that leads from one floor to the other which looks splendid in the promotional pictures, so I suspect that from a certain point of view it admirably ticks all the boxes.
I have to yet to organise and post more pictures from the trip; for some reason I have been putting that off. And it’s not that most obvious cause, that the shock of returning means I do not want to engage with what was a period of such happiness and adventure. I think it’s a lot more banal, and stems from my long-held dislike of doing tasks that will result in an interesting outcome but are not interesting in themselves. There really should be a better way of organising large numbers of photos, though that line of thinking will lead me down another favourite path: research into the possible tools I could use, rather than time spent on the task itself.
And what, then, have I learned? I thought all the way around that when I got back the dust would settle and the difference between going and not going would present itself. Am I am any different now to when I wrote the first entry on these pages? I must admit I have no idea. Lots of people have asked me what the highlight was and I tell them that overall it was the Galapagos and that the single most impressive thing was the glacier at Perito Moreno, and that is completely true. But I sense a longer answer forming and re-forming just out of my reach, maybe something set in motion that has not yet had time to reach a recognisable state. No-one wants to hear that, of course. The experience that meant so much to me is not something that can be compressed into a fifteen-second sound-bite by the water cooler, where all that is required is the fulfilment of an inquiry often motivated as much by politeness as interest.
My memory works in strange ways, as anyone who would expect me to remember their birthday can attest, and often in an idle moment I will try and project myself back to a point in my life and really feel what it was like to be there. Often I think of college and what it was like to cycle from Glendara to the university, what the road was like, how cold it was, the uphill and downhill parts, how it was to lock my bike and walk into the reading room where I spent so much of my final year, take a seat unnoticed among the others lost in their own internal worlds of exams and projects and pressure, and engage as best as I could with something that never came very easily to me. Or what it was like to walk to work in Cork along the river, facing an morning editorial meeting in the Examiner that was hopefully the canonical example in my life of bringing a knife to a machine-gun fight. Or what it was like in India to wake up in the huge hotel-like bed and go outside to eat a breakfast prepared by a cook, then be driven to work, then answer query after query for advertisers in another continent. And often I find that I cannot recapture it exactly. Even if I can remember what the rooms and the streets and the people looked like, I cannot put myself there convincingly, I cannot trigger the associations with other events and memories and ideas that together form the mesh of a complex experience.
Over the past few days I have found that at least for now, I can reach in my mind the places I have been in the past few months. I can place myself on the quad bike in Easter Island, on the boat in Perito Moreno, in the cockroach hostel in Montevideo, in the cold-air streets of Ushuaia, in the ceramic heat of Buenos Aires. I find it incredibly comforting that the raw materials of the experience of still with me, clear and strong, and I think that from them yet may come that conclusion or lesson that I have been searching for.
Recording the experience here on this blog has been deeply rewarding for me, and as I often joke I probably had a lot more fun writing it than anyone did reading it. Sometimes when I read back over the entries I cringe – how many times can one man use the word ‘entirely’? – but other times they bring back a detail that unlocks an exponential torrent of memory. Sometimes I can hardly remember writing them at all, and the words seem like those of a stranger. But I have enjoyed creating it very much. I will continue to write here from time to time, though the entries will be less frequent and the topics more likely to be random things I find interesting, and therefore almost by definition not something others will find quite the same.
To those of you who have stayed with me all the way through or dipped in and out or in some other way done me the honour of reading something I have written: thank you. There were occasional times of loneliness where writing here made me feel closer to the people I was missing, a rare counter-examples to the social fragmentation of technology. It has been wonderful to know that by posting on these pages I can reach people around the world, and that is an entirely (!) parallel pleasure to the trip itself. For that, my deepest thanks to you all.
