改善弁
I don’t know about you but something strange happens when I travel great distances at speed.
It’s more than just jet lag.
Step off a plane a few hundred miles away and suddenly, it’s someone else’s money I’m spending.
Sometimes a bit of that new person sticks around even after the old me catches up with all his baggage.
But every time, there’s an adventure to be had — and Future Ben foots the bill.
So — tequila shots all round before he gets here.
One of the worst parts about travelling is arriving to find that you’re already there.
65 miles. 1,074 miles. 3,547 miles. 5,919 miles…
No matter how many miles away we fly, it never seems to be far enough to escape what’s going on in those brain folds.
Travelling a long way from home always seems to dredge up a bunch of old stuff that should have been dealt with a long time ago. We’re always over that baggage allowance.
Distance makes the heart grow fonder.
But it’s through a pink-tinted telescope.
The world is full of convenient stories, and one of them is that other people can help you get what you want.
That probably seems morbid, but the truth is that most people haven’t even figured out how to get what they want. And what we want is prone to change.
It’s often a struggle to decide what we want for dinner, let alone what we want to do with our life.
Maya Angelou has a great line that goes, “Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”
The way I see it, we’re all out here shirtless in one way or another. And as we’re headed on a long journey, there’s no telling what the weather might do on the way.
I’m no Maya Angelou, so the best I can do is, “Pack a jumper just in case.”
It wasn’t until I was 27 that I went skinny dipping.
Out in the Bay of Dragons in North Vietnam, my head swimming from Bia Hanoi and cheap rice wine, I finally took my clothes off in front of people I wasn’t about to have sex with.
And we plunged into the dark, star-speckled water, and I was free.
It still took another three years before I had the nerve to show myself to anybody.
I had been holding myself back, fretting about what people would think of me, laying my thoughts bare to the world; worrying what other people would think about what I think.
And whether I would measure up to everyone else writing out there.
But you know what?
Just like that balmy night on Monkey Island, as soon as I took my clothes off, I stopped caring.
It was the easiest, most natural thing in the world.
Whatever it is that you’re hiding inside you, put it out there.
You were born that way.