Here’s a farewell note that I’m about to send, announcing my journey and my renunciation of a secure life:
Dearest Friends,
As you know, I have been wanting to do everything but settle down. I’ve been restless, at the peak of unease; consistently wanting to scratch the itch of wanderlust but never quite got around to do so. People tell me to stay in touch with reality and I did-by having a full time job, a miserable time and of course, financial security. Indeed, I was happy and everyone else around me was too. They thought- ah, finally little Ying has seen the light. She’s now a working young lady with a briefcase, a pair of high-heels and a dosage of overtime hours to match.
However, the call to board flights into the foreign remained insistent. “The beauty of any flight, after all, is that, as soon as we leave the ground, we leave a sense of who we are behind.” Well said, Mr. Iyer. “It is when we we rise and rise through the clouds, into a blue stillness, and the very ‘we’ and ‘I’ that seemed so urgent when we awoke become as remote, as hard to take seriously, as that house far, far below, now invisible. ”
In that sense, travelling is not about escaping reality but rather about losing your ego of who you are and who you were. It is about opening up a dam of alternative realities. It puts every facet of life on a supermarket shelf, and you as a consumer, can choose.
After a good friend that I met over CouchSurfing cajoled me to get off my comfort couch and stand on my toes to look forward, into the horizon of endless possibilities, that I finally decided to take my dreams one step further: I quit my job. All it took for him was to quote what I wrote in my travel feature article: “Dreams have an expiry date. The passion fuel only runs for a limited time” and the rest was history.
But of course, I relied on divine intervention as well while making my decision. I came out of McDonald’s one day, and there, under the afternoon sun, was a motorcycle parked and a sticker on it, shouting “GO!!!!!!”. It was utterly stark and abrupt but it shone its meaning clearly.
Two months later, and in a couple of days, it will be time for me to stumble into the foreign, to grope around a little bit in the shadows, to confront the unknown and perhaps find myself during amidst those solitary moments. I will be making an overland journey to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and eventually settling in Hanoi, Vietnam to pad the wallet. And then hopefully, onwards to Europe to secure a Masters and eventually living there? I don’t know. As the documentary The Secret advised:If you are going to drive from point A to B in the middle of the night, all you need to see is 200 metres ahead of you. Eventually, you will arrive at your destination.
With that, I bid everyone goodbye…not forever, but for the temporary absence.
Wait-you splutter-what about your golden future, your career? Are you just going to throw it all away?
In answer to that, here are several quotes from the famous George Monbiot, a UK journalist who is highly regarded within the media arena.
“How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will spend just two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded to the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?
So my second piece of career advice echoes the political advice offered by Benjamin Franklin: whenever you are faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither. People who sell their souls for the promise of a secure job and a secure salary are spat out as soon as they become dispensable. The more loyal to an institution you are, the more exploitable, and ultimately expendable, you become.”
“So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones – their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world – upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.
You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?”
Read Choose Life by George Monbiot for full blown inspiration.
Take care, stay in touch and amuse yourself visually at www.kherying.multiply.com while I set up a travelogue.
A big thank you too for your friendship and support over the years….without each and everyone of you, I wouldn’t be who I am today! Please stay in touch okay?
Very warmly,
Ying
PS-Please send me your home addresses and mobile phone numbers. If you’re lucky, you may receive a postcard or two!
If you have to know: Originally, this blog was meant to be named: Stories for The Squidman, as it was good old Steve-o who kicked my ass and told me that I should be the one going for my dreams instead of encouraging someone else to do so. He was my personal cheerleader, my walking info kiosk and above all, a wonderful friend. He introduced me to contacts in Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil and Italy. He kept adding fuel whenever the fire of traveling dims; he cajoled; he chatised; he inspired. In the end, if it was not for him, I wouldn’t have thought that working and traveling is possible.
