Inventing The Future-Blueprints for Tomorrow
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Inventing the Future
A Multinational Soul's Cosmic Journey
"It's already here - Just not evenly distributed"
The Awakening
Work Is Prayer
My universe is made of stories, not atoms: land, air and sea travel and the power of now. If I wanted to be a multinational soul, I couldn't do it in cities where I taught English like New York or Los Angeles, Paris or Tokyo alone - I needed to get consecrated by sailing on the oceans.
Norwegian Fjords
God's One and Only Voice Is Silence
It's a wonderful thing to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know anyone; where, as Melville said, "God's one and only voice is Silence."
If Hollywood is loneliness under a Hawaiian palm tree, then happiness is solitude sailing through the fjords.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, once you let go of the life you have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for you.
Ship Happens
Monotony Tinged with Hysteria
Living on a ship might be summed up as monotony tinged with hysteria. It's not real life but an alibi. It is like going out of your mind everyday - in order to come to your senses; and a fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.
After 10 ships, yes TEN, I no longer want to cast doubt on perfection - America.
As An Art Director and World Cruise Coordinator, the experiences at sea turned my can't into cans and leveraged my dreams into serendipity - a thousand unseen helping hands.
Money isn't the root of all evil, boredom is the root of all evil, a spiritual anorexia - the despairing refusal to be oneself.
American Dream
The Currency of Freedom
Being born in America is like being kidnapped and sold into slavery and the shared hallucination of running on the treadmill of consumption and materialism. It's a mask that eats up the face. It's also like winning the lottery, a currency, and I wanted to spend it well.
The disease of more in a world of plenty where most of the developing world is starving.
Yet, we value material, we ignore emotions. If I wanted to serve my country, I had to betray it. What was the blue chip idea worth betraying? The lack of simplicity and the yearn for complexity was, and in many ways still is, my blind spot.
The Cure
From Tourist to Traveler
The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom. I was willing to risk pain (culture shock) to make a boring life interesting and re-framing (Home is a feeling not a place) travel as a verb and not a noun. You have to DO it.
A 1 man National Geographic on that everywhere trip. The good, the bad and the ugly American - Why be difficult when you can be impossible. Hell was about to be other people, other cultures, other languages, and the National Anthem of Hell, was Frank Sinatra's "I did it my way".
I had to make the switch from tourist to traveler, and adapt, otherwise this journey would be Karaoke traveling, a cheap imitation of the best yet to come.
Time Millionaire
Resourcefulness Over Resources
Without risk, faith is an impossibility. My "leap of faith" to give up all things material was curiosity. The cure for my ennui and boredom was "Any place but here" and "I want to be surprised everyday".
Now that I didn't need Power Point to explain my job, how much was I worth now that I was no longer in the W2 world of 9 to 5. I was a time millionaire. It was going to be about resourcefulness and not resources.
Privileged Homeless
Transit Lounger Forever
I meet therefore I am - a multinational soul. I shrink therefore I am part of — and apart from American, European and Asian culture. The countries I visit(ed) and live(d) in are as eclectic and restless as ports of call I "inhabit" for six hours or at most three daze.
The cult of the amateur wanderers is growing; global souls who haven't been everywhere but it is on their list; for whom home is a feeling, not a place in the soil but inside yourself. I am one of the privileged homeless.
Along with the displacement, and the associated "jet lag" and culture shock, I am simply a fairly glib product of a movable feast, living and working in a world that is itself increasingly small and increasingly hybrid - a transit lounger, forever heading to the all "aboard" by 6PM gangway.