As Grace and I were planning for our frighteningly imminent world tour we decided early on that we were going to have a blog. I’m not sure why we set our hearts upon such a thing. I am not, nor is Grace, to my knowledge, a particularly diligent diarist and my creative writing has largely been confined to snide emails and bond offering memoranda in recent years. In my defense, if you think there is no creativity involved in making a baggage handling company or a ladder manufacturer seem exciting to investors you are gravely mistaken; I have spent years of my life writing narratives about companies so mythically boring it is difficult to believe they exist at all except to serve as a punchline in an office-set comedy.
It is difficult to know how to begin a new creative endeavour, because to do so requires either a concrete goal or an imperviousness to the potential embarrassment that comes from changing or ending the endeavour altogether. Unluckily, I have neither, which is why a large pile of discarded ideas slumps in the mid-recesses of my mind. But Graham Greene wrote in The End of the Affair, “[a] story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead,” and people really seemed to like his writing so I’ll take his word for it. Here is the arbitrary moment.
In two and a bit weeks Grace and I will be married. In three we will have stashed or thrown out our earthly possessions save what can be carried in two 50L backpacks and will be on our way to visit more countries than I’ve seen in the rest of my life combined. We will have to adjust to a different lifestyle, to looking out of place every day, to coming up with new focuses and ambitions in the absence of a career to structure our lives. But we’ll also get to see parts of the world barely anyone I’ve ever met has been to, and hopefully get some new insight about the world and ourselves. Or at least maybe a real suntan for the first time in my life.
I suppose I hope that writing here will do a few things: allow us to keep in touch more easily with our family and friends around the world; help keep a record of what we’ve seen; and give the two of us a new avenue to spark discussions between ourselves. What one of us records may be totally different from the other, and that’s exciting! In the moment we may lack the insight that comes from putting virtual pen to paper.
At any rate, you may get a whole lot of pretentious drivel from me, but the pictures should be pretty!
–Chris
PS wish us luck at our wedding!