I am cleaning out my guest room in anticipation of the beginning of my travels tomorrow. I am sure that tomorrow my mindset will be one of wonder and anticipation, but tonight it is one of nostalgia and reminiscence. I pull out this poster board with photos. I assembled it as I began my senior year of college in 2009, one of the first times in my life I had this many photos that made me happy. The frame has been damaged since before I came to Hong Kong, but amazingly it has survived all these moves. Now has come the time to dissemble it. I scratch off the scotch tape with my fingernails, peeling off patterns that the same fingers had laid down so many years ago. The tape has aged so much while it hung on my walls, nearly degrading into a mass of resin. Oblivious was I to this process while I passed times of laughter, sorrow, suffering, joy, hate and love. I see pictures of friends I still cherish, and some I no longer do. I see a version of me who has no idea how much is going to happen over the next 6 years.
Tomorrow in a different place this all will seem far away. I know because I've been there before. It was a shock even after a week and a half in Burma, returning to the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong as if no one else had just experienced a slow reflective life off the grid in a developing country. I know I'm going to get on the ground in Sapa and regret just how fast my life was in Hong Kong. I know that the traveling me will enjoy so many hours of the day and have some chill advice, but the working me would slap that advice around with a disparaging self-righteous look of someone suffering to make money. The working me will want to remind the traveling me that ideals rarely apply to reality here somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing one needs a bit of both in life - the busy times to push forward on one's priorities, and the slower times for one to rejuvenate all areas that weren't prioritized.
Hong Kong truly was packed. There were times in my life where I felt bored enough to create a "Things to do While Bored" list, times where I wanted to go out but couldn't. That wasn't ever a problem in Hong Kong. My life instead was filled with books I never got around to reading, spices I never got around to cooking with, letters I never got around to writing. And I'm not particularly upset by them. The last four years were spent without a television, without a Netflix account and without any computer games. In one sense I did far less time wasting than I normally would.
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