Taste of Possibilities

I found the recent "Food" issue of The New Yorker to be kind of inspiring.

Like the story by Jane Kramer about Jeff Alford and Naomi Duguin, who met in Tibet, restless and wanting to see every corner of the world, and finding a life partner in each other, and raising children while backpacking through Asia and writing articles about food, traveling and immersing themselves. But like food was just the vehicle that allowed them to do it, that structured the travels. Otherwise they live in a house in Toronto, or sometimes on the family farm in the country. It was a story about how people fashion a way of living for themselves that is on their own terms, and diverges from convention, but being comfortable in that, normalizing that, and not worrying about impossibilities.

Another thing that intrigued me about them is the fact that when they go, they stay for a while, like months at a time (they used to pack a semester's worth of homework with them so they could travel with the kids) and also they keep going back, all the time, over and over. Like Alford became enthralled by Thailand early on and has managed to get back there about once a year. I think travel feels precious to me right now, and so I would feel pressure that any trip I take be well planned and executed, so as to get the full benefit from the trip. But to go back again and again would allow you to just Absorb, and not worry about it, because you know you'll have another chance.

And the fact that they were comfortable taking their sons with them everywhere; I thought about this because Bill had recently said he'd like us to take several trips a year, and not feel like we can't go just because we have a house now, or the dog for that matter. I don't have the same wanderlust that I felt right after I'd graduated from college. I think the few months of backpacking around the Mediterranean that I did made me crave a feeling of being settled, having a neighborhood and a routine. I guess Alford and Duguin, by completely immersing themselves in foreign places, are able to get that settled, connected feeling everywhere they have gone. I don't know that I want to live a life like that right now, but I want to remember to be open to it, to see the value in that. So it doesn't one day become an impossibility.