Life is now

Today we have been away for 10 weeks. Ten weeks of which there has not been one that went according to plan. Even though I kept telling everyone I didn’t want to plan too much in order to keep our options open, I obviously did have plans. Because who doesn’t have plans? You don’t have to actually fulfill one of them, but it’s always good to have one, even if it’s only to decide to change it. Maybe it’s just better to call them ideas, rather than plans. Because the danger of having plans is that you start putting blinkers on and stop looking around. And that you, as a result, will focus too much on your ‘plan’ rather than your possibilities.

I had plans in my head, visions about how things would possibly be, what we would do, images in my head of laughing kids on white sand beaches. I had imagined a life in which I would feel hundred percent happy, dancing around in a colorful dress, looking ten times prettier than in real life, lacking worries and wrinkles, and how my kids would not have any fits or bad moods, how they would not ever complain or fall down, how they would just be playing all day every day. They would look clean and proper like Instagram pictures of perfect families.

Obviously I did not have the illusion it would actually be anything like this, but then again, when you leave for a trip like this, it is kind of impossible to have a clear picture of what it’s gonna be like.

It’s an understatement to say that this trip has been completely different from what I pictured it, but I was right about one thing: Before we left I felt very strongly that traveling was what we needed to do. And although traveling has been much harder than I could ever anticipate and we have had much more setbacks than I would have ever had hoped, I still feel exactly the same: this, whatever we are doing, is what we needed to do.

It makes sense, even if it doesn’t. Our plans do not have heads nor tails. We make silly mistakes, we end up at surreal airbnb’s where drunk girls stomp about at night, crashing on couches. We spend way too much time at the mechanics and way too little time on the road. We sweat and swear while struggling to pull our half broken suitcase after us. We throw up in ferries. We struggle to find healthy vegan food, ending up eating greasy chapatis almost every day.

But then other things happen too, great things, things that make more sense than anything else. Like when we suddenly find great food in weird places. Like when we see incredible wild animals just standing at the roadside. Like when we walk up some rocks and suddenly see the most beautiful sea, a blue so intense it hurts your eyes. Like when the kids start playing with other kids from faraway countries, running around on the beach until it's way past bedtime. Like when you go out for dinner with your family and end up at a table full of people from all over the world like you are a twenty year old backpacker.

My friend was telling me the other day about how the corona passport will influence daily life (if not vaccinated). How simple things like having a beer after playing football will be impossible, or watching the swimming lessons of your kid from the canteen.

We were talking about how you can easily live without such things. How activities like going to a cinema or a restaurant are all just luxury, a cherry on a cake, and how your life can be full and beautiful without it. Having said that, in a way this narrative is too simple and not even really true. (Beside the question if excluding people from certain simple activities because of their medical choices is at all acceptable)

Simple things make sense if it is what you want to do. It doesn’t really matter how simple or how complicated things are, as long as it is what you feel like doing.

Simple things make sense if it provides you with experiences that are important to you. Obviously you can make memories anywhere, which is what people will sometimes tell you when you say you are traveling the world. Like it shouldn’t matter where you are, that you should be able to be happy anywhere under any circumstances and that traveling is just a luxury, an excess, a cherry on an unnecessary cake. That might be true to some extent, if you dedicate your life to buddhism and study every day of your life to become truly enlightened. However, for regular people like you and me this is just a load of crap. It is not up to other people to decide what you need in life to be happy. It is not up to someone else to decide if traveling is an excess, or if going to a restaurant unvaccinated is something you don’t really need in life.

What everyone needs is to feel like you have the freedom to be where you want to be. This can just as much be at home watching Netflix on the couch as it can be in the African bush making super on a gas stove. It can just as much be on the road as it can be partying at a nightclub or watching your kid from the canteen of the swimming pool. And if you are happier on the road, then you should be able to be there. If you are happy going to the cinema you should be able to go.

It’s not up to anyone other than yourself to decide what you want to experience and which experiences will give you the happiness that you seek.

We have all (all of us white privileged western peeps) grown up in a world where we have too many choices and surely this made us all very entitled and spoiled and all that, but it’s already too late now. We are already used to the fact that we can choose for things that make us happy (up to some point, of course. There are many restrictions, will come back to that at a later stage). We choose our career, we decide where we want to live, how many children we want, if any at all.

What I am trying to say is, for all of us rich entitled white people, whether it is justified or not, the freedom to choose is important. And that I am very thankful for the fact that we have had the freedom to choose to make this trip. It would have made me extremely angry if someone would have tried to stop me from doing it.

So, ten weeks later our itinerary has changed about twenty five times. We have had to adapt because of circumstances and because of ever changing ideas and because of new insights. It has been messy and chaotic, which is pretty much in line with the way we do things in our daily lives.

The past two and a half months have already given us more than we could think of. In a way I like a different person and at the same time I know I am pretty much the same. I have the same explosive personality, my kids are the same, they still have bad moods and they still don’t look clean and proper. My wrinkles are still there and I am not happy 100 % of the time.

I have not reached some incredible new insights, I have not suddenly seen a light I have never seen before and I have not miraculously found my destiny in life (which would have been strange since I do not really believe in fate).

More than anything, I realized that at this point I have no desire to return to the life that we led before. Maybe that is because of the physical distance, or maybe because the world here seems to be so different from anything else and our experiences have been so intense that I can just not imagine going back to this ‘normal’ life.

For the same reason that it’s hard to imagine going back to that life, it is hard for me to find words to describe the life we are living now. It feels like it doesn’t matter what I say, every word will lose meaning as soon as I type it down, and that as soon as someone will read it, it will have lost even more meaning because the way someone interprets words is always going to be different from your own. It feels like by the time my words reach the ones that will read this, the story will have lost most of its weight. Like it’s too different from ‘regular’ life to be able to relate to it. And at the same time I know that that’s bollocks, because it doesn’t matter where you are, feelings are always relatable.

This trip has been more stressful to me than I wanted. I have had moments where I just want to explode and throw stuff in people’s faces. I have moments in which I felt helpless. Moments in which I asked myself, why in the world would I want to spend so many hours in a hot car, with a kid asking ‘are we there yet’ every ten minutes? Why do I want to keep exploring places that sometimes aren’t even worth taking a dump in? Why do I exhaust myself and the rest of the family with these crazy undertakings? At times I do not have the answer for that, and at times I feel sad about that fact, but somehow, even when feeling like shit and stressed and frustrated, the thought of going back at this moment does not feel like an alternative. I never feel like we are in the wrong place, even with all the setbacks.

So. I will just stick with my guts. I stick with what I see when I look at my kids, who have their difficulties but generally have a wonderful time. I stick with what I see when I see my husband, having the time of his life, even when at times we are all dark and grumpy and tired and angry. I can’t tell you why, but it still feels like this is what we are supposed to do. Where we are is where we need to be. What we are doing is what we need to be doing. I can’t say what we will need in one, two or three months, but that does not matter now.

There is this restaurant next to the beach in Jambiani, Zanzibar. Right at the place where you walk out of their beautiful place onto the beach, they put up this pergola kind of gate, a Gateway to the beach. As you walk underneath it, there is a sign where it is written, in simple caps lock letters: Life is now. And I know it’s corny and cheesy and cliché, but somehow it is the best sign you could ever make, because it keeps reminding you every time you walk past it: life. Is. now. Every time you read it, you can ask yourself if the life that you live now is the life you want to live. This simple sign above this simple pergola probably wouldn't have a lot of Impact on me if I would have not felt so strongly about this statement at that time. If

So each time that I realize I am where I want to be is a blessing, because I know there is no other place I would prefer to be and right now, which is the moment that we live in, we are good