I am also grateful for the challenges of having to be flexible. In my work I have gained, and I believed have earned, a reputation for being an artist, a traveller, tenacious and resourceful. I would like to begin with an examination of how all these four characteristics dovetail and intersect with one another. To do well as an artist and a traveller one would have to be both tenacious and resourceful. You have to let your creativity move beyond art making and touch every facet of life if you are going to travel well. By the same token you also have to be tenacious. There is so much to have to endure and get through and get past in order to travel well, especially if you are living on a tight budget as I am.
This begins months in advance with researching the places you want to visit. What are the attractions? What are the risks? The dangers? How much time and money am I able and willing to invest? What kind of tradeoffs as a budget traveller am I prepared to live with? This also involves researching and contacting potential accommodations, making the necessary reservations, then booking a flight with a travel agent, getting something that fits in my budget that won't also be absolute torture (never easy and often impossible when flying economy, or, third class steerage in the air).
Then there is arriving there, learning the terrain, facing with the locals, taking risk after risk after risk, especially with the possibility, and often inevitability of making new friendships, and there is dealing well with the language. Will my Spanish be good enough? I will be living for thirty-one days in Spanish while seeking to improve my language abilities, and meeting people and learning more about their lives, the country, city, culture, history, the ecology. There is also sourcing adequate food, always a challenge, given that I'm vegetarian.
It isn't all happy-happy, joy-joy. Travel at times for me can be challenging, sometimes miserable. Any one of you brave enough to read my travel stories on this blog will know what I'm talking about. Despite my many complaints at times, it is always worth it. I always come home feeling, if tired, also wiser, humbler, and more enriched.
To do this kind of travel well I have to be resourceful and tenacious. I always carry art materials with me and spend hours drawing and colouring in coffee shops and restaurants, often meeting a lot of great and interesting locals onsite. This can only do wonders for my neurotransmitters, especially at the age of sixty-one at which a lot of people tend to opt more for comfort, ease, convenience and the path of least resistance: one of the surest paths to contracting early Alzheimer's or dementia.
I am happy to say that the many challenges and risks that I embrace on my travels I am adapting again to my daily life at home. I seem again to be becoming more creative, spontaneous and adaptable to unexpected exigencies. Today for example, following a session with my client and a student I have been mentoring, I walked as usual to one of my favourite local coffee shops for my iced coffee and chocolate cookie. On the way, I realized that I needed to stop and pick up a prescription in the BC Cancer Agency building I was passing. This is a medication I have to take to keep the tumour on my pituitary and dangerously close to my brain from growing and endangering my life. Then I remembered that I had forgotten my paperwork today, because I was needing to hand it in early, otherwise it might be a challenge coming up with enough food money until my other sites pay me for the month's work. I was kicking my ass and complaining bitterly to God while trying to figure out an alternative strategy, then decided I would borrow from my savings account, which I really don't want to deplete, needing the funds for my travels. I decided I'd live with it just the same. Then, due to a miscommunication, I had to cancel my next appointment, affording me just enough time to go home immediately, pick up the paperwork, finish filling it out on the bus and hand it in immediately at the office, making me only a little bit late for my third and final assignment on the other side of town.
Following my last professional appointment, I waited ten minutes for the bus and it didn't appear to be coming. Rather that wait and get frustrated and try not to feel sorry for myself along with the other people standing at the bus stop, some of whom would likely get to where they were going walking but were just too lazy or didn't have the imagination, I got walking. Seven blocks later, at Broadway and Alma, there was still no bus in sight, but I did catch immediately a 99 express bus, transferred to a Granville bus that I only had to run a little bit to catch, and got home much faster than had I stayed at that bus stop.
This is much closer to the way I used to live when I was younger, and the way I have learned to travel. Foreign travel has helped return me to the flexible creativity and adaptability that I enjoyed before I was fifty. Now, more than ten years later, I am glad to have it back again.
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