Musings on a Last Grand Adventure

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Can I give up world travel and blissful moments like these in spectacular settings for a 9-5? Only if it makes me happy.

I’m sitting here at my desk, in my room, in my apartment, musing about my future. I do that a lot these days as I have a lot to think about, prepare for, and consider.

When people meet me and talk to me, they often comment on my goals and aspirations and think I have my life sorted out. I find that amusing, as I don’t feel like that at all. I have ideas, and thoughts, and some tentative goals I would like to see myself accomplish, but otherwise I feel like my future is one giant question mark with a million different paths leading out from it. How to chose, what to chose, and where to chose often run through my mind, sometimes with a spark of panic behind it, worried that I’m doing something wrong and should already know where I want my life to be.

Four years ago, I promised myself I would spend as much time traveling the world as I did on my University education. Five years to learn inside a classroom, five years to learn outside a classroom. An entire decade of my life simply learning and taking in everything I can. Currently, I’m in the last few weeks at home on the beginnings of what I believe to be my final grand adventure. Year Five on an epic jaunt through parts of the world I never thought I’d go to till later in life, and the potential of meeting people and experiencing things that will change my life. However, this doesn’t actually mean I stop traveling after this trip; it just means I may not be going on another six month adventure. But that also doesn’t mean plans won’t change from what I believe them to be, because who really knows where life leads? But I do know that at some point, all good things must come to an end for other good (and different) things to begin.

In some ways I’m very sad that this might be my last epic journey (although I do have backup travel plans of traveling the world for a year with my partner) and I will definitely be jaunting around for one to two months whenever I can swing the vacation time. But I’m finding that the lead-up to this trip is very different from the last four, because I go into it knowing that it may be my last and I need to wrap my head around that fact. I need to start planning for a future and a life after my six months on the road and I need to think in terms of where I want to be and what I want to be doing. The reason I bring this all up, is that I think I’m beginning to feel ready to have some sort of stability in my life in the shape of a career I’m passionate about. What that is, is still unknown. But just knowing that it sounds appealing to me is a good sign I’m getting ready to vest my energy into something other than the wonder that travel has brought me. I just hope that my future career will be able to harness everything I’ve learned in the last four years and make something useful and productive of it.

So as I slowly prepare myself in my final weeks in Canada, I will be dreaming and wondering where this last grand adventure might take me, what it will teach me, and what opportunities and doors it will open for me after all is said and done. And if it goes how I think it might, I can guarantee that it will take me somewhere just as amazing as the last half decade has.

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