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"Be prepared to walk away. Many of the happiest men and women in our society today are those who, at a certain point, got up and walked away from a situation that they finally realized was not making them happy or fulfilled."
"If we create our worldview then we can re-create it too by taking a different perspective and reframing our situation."
Can you remember the feeling of first arriving in a new place? The way your senses are awakened and everything feels intense? The way the smells make everything feel more 3-dimensional, somehow. It's the part of a memory, I realize, that disappears first and the memory becomes more flat. And so strange it is to be back in Indonesia. Sulawesi is about 60% Christian but the landscape and secular culture feel the same as Bali. Just no offerings littering the sidewalks and entranceways to homes and shops. The humidity is dense and penetrating, and I can't stop sweating. There's a general pervasive fragrance in the air. I'm feeling very alive.
July 5, 2012
I predicted waking at 3:00 am the first night and being completely disoriented. I woke, as predicted, at 3:00, though I knew where I was. Sleeping in a very basic wood thatched bungalow, as I have so many times before. It feels familiar and comfortable. Floor fan on full blast, lying awake in the middle of the night listening to rain fall with such a monotonous tempo that it starts to blend with the whirring of the fan and all become one sound. Again, a sound heard so many times before. It's a little odd to me to experience something so exotic and distant as so familiar. And it's one of those elements of travel that is so stimulating; that is, the most mundane experience of background noise, but instead of tuning it out as an annoyance, tuning in to it as it is part of the whole. As someone (not me) well versed in the complexity of music or wine can breakdown all of the components to show the inherent complexity, the smell here has a similar complexity though I cannot break it down. Probably a mixture of local flowers, wood smoke, salt air, tobacco, and other things. It's a fragrant earthiness that is just so stimulating to the lungs and nose and makes me feels alive. A good place to start.
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