{"id":6191,"date":"2012-12-19T05:23:08","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T05:23:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=6191"},"modified":"2018-08-08T14:57:49","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T14:57:49","slug":"0011-thinking-about-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0011-thinking-about-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"0011 &#8211; I want to travel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>word vomit 1000 words in 15 minutes no editing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Thing on my mind right now, oddly, is travelling. I&#8217;m walking around my house thinking about how\u00a0familiar\u00a0everything is. I went to the toilet to take a piss- and my living room and kitchen are in absolute, utter darkness because the prayer altar is off (God doesn&#8217;t visit your house when there&#8217;s a death in the family, or something like that- mother&#8217;s uncle passed away) and it&#8217;s interesting how I&#8217;m able to navigate it anyway, because it&#8217;s so familiar to me. I know my house inside out. No surprise there, I guess. I went to Al Salam in Tampines for the first time in a long time, and it&#8217;s amazing how\u00a0familiar\u00a0it all is. Everything. I mean, we can look at this at so many different scales. Singapore itself is so beautifully familiar when you come back after you travel.<\/p>\n<p>I went on cruises as a kid, and I went to India with my parents a couple of times to visit my grandparents, but none of those experiences mattered very much. The travel experiences I explicitly remember are the times I&#8217;ve travelled either with friends, or with the missus. I think there&#8217;s something about travelling when you need to be responsible for yourself that puts you on extra &#8220;high alert&#8221;- and I imagine you don&#8217;t quite experience that as a tourist on package deals, because you&#8217;re kind of insulated from the world- the world presents itself in front of you, but it&#8217;s safe- you don&#8217;t need to directly immerse yourself into the local culture. My idea of travelling is going to coffeeshops and having conversations with locals.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not like an obsessive die-die-want-to-travel sort, but there are a few things I&#8217;d really like to do. Interestingly, the things on my mind are- I want to go to New York to experience the sort of intensity that exists there. Maybe I&#8217;d like to visit Silicon Valley, but I have no real reason to, and I&#8217;m not particularly a techie anymore, so I&#8217;m not sure why- maybe because I&#8217;d like to visit the people on Quora. Yeah, I&#8217;d like to go on a roadtrip visiting Quorans. I&#8217;d also really like to take a long drive down the seaside highway in Australia. These are the things that kinda top my travel list. I&#8217;d also just like to travel and backpack around for the joy of it- Cambodia, Thailand- they&#8217;re all pretty nearby. I&#8217;m thinking, I want to do this because I want to see what happens to me, I want to know who I am when I&#8217;m outside of my comfort zone. I know, ultimately there&#8217;s only one journey, and it&#8217;s within yourself- one of the most amazing experiences I had this year was doing standup comedy. It was something always on my mind, somewhat, and I finally did it, and it was amazing. I felt so alive. I want to feel that alive as much as possible, all the time. I want to be happy and engaged and alive. I don&#8217;t think this will be a magic solution to my problems or anything, and I too am a little bit suspicious of living-by-a-bucket-list, but I think there&#8217;s a middle ground to be achieved.<\/p>\n<p>Put more simply, I really don&#8217;t like the idea of living in today&#8217;s globalized world, but only having been born and raised in Singapore, and maybe travelling like a tourist to other countries. I&#8217;m not interested in going to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower to take pictures and post them onto Facebook. I&#8217;m more interested in say, learning Muay Thai in Thailand, and playing in a band in the UK or something. That sort of shit. I want to immerse myself in humanity and see more of it- I can&#8217;t shake the feeling that my experience is awfully limited. I would like to try some mind-altering experiences, as long as it&#8217;s safe and controlled. I just do,<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s a shame to NOT experience as much of the spectrum of experience that life has to offer you.<\/p>\n<p>This is my 11th word vomit, I think, and it&#8217;s interesting to see how my mind is working now. I won&#8217;t pretend to know what&#8217;s going on, and I&#8217;m not going to theorize too much about it- but it does feel like the initial &#8220;dirty water&#8221; has been hosed out and what&#8217;s coming out now is a little more &#8220;clean&#8221; or &#8220;pure&#8221;. Or maybe I&#8217;m just making that up to fit the narrative I&#8217;ve crafted for myself. Either way. It&#8217;s still interesting.<\/p>\n<p>What else. I&#8217;ve been meaning to do monthly summaries, and I was kind of thinking of doing one for December 2012 in the form of a Word Vomit- or maybe I&#8217;ll do all of them this way. The plan isn&#8217;t to make a big deal out of it or anything- it&#8217;s just to have some reference material when looking back at my life- I want to be able to do battle against the narrative bias in my head. If you keep a monthly account of your life (without spending too much time on it, of course, because living your life should be a greater priority than chronicling it), I believe that you will capture elements that you will otherwise miss if you simply use hindsight recollection.<\/p>\n<p>At several points in my past- once I wanted to go to Oxford, at some point I wanted to go to SAJC, at some point I wanted to go to Poly, NTU Mass Comm, then NUS FASS, then SMU Social Science, then I started going sour-grapes on the whole thing. At some point I wanted to ditch everything and tour with a rock and roll band, however that was to be accomplished&#8230; the point I&#8217;m making is, we tidy up our narratives on hindsight, but that doesn&#8217;t give us the whole picture&#8230; I want more of the picture. I want more of the experience. At the same time, I want to NOT fall into the trap of obsessing with more-more-more to the point where having things or acquiring experiences like notches on a bedpost becomes a priority over the actual joy of experience, of life.<\/p>\n<p>I think there is a balance to be had between a sort of goal-setting and a goal of no goals, a kind of worldliness and a kind of ascetic zen, a kind of discipline and a kind of freedom. It will take time to emerge but I am developing the idea very organically, very naturally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>word vomit 1000 words in 15 minutes no editing Thing on my mind right now, oddly, is travelling. I&#8217;m walking around my house thinking about how\u00a0familiar\u00a0everything is. I went to the toilet to take a piss- and my living room and kitchen are in absolute, utter darkness because the prayer&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[375],"class_list":["post-6191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-wants"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>0011 - I want to travel - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0011-thinking-about-travel\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"0011 - I want to travel - 1,000,000 words by @visakanv\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"word vomit 1000 words in 15 minutes no editing Thing on my mind right now, oddly, is travelling. 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