traveling to my future self

december 21 – future self: imagine yourself five years from now. what advice would you give your current self for the year ahead? (bonus: write a note to yourself 10 years ago. what would you tell your younger self?)

if there's one thing i've learned, it's that it's impossible to predict the future. you simply don't know where the choices you make in life will take you. and you will always be surprised. all you can do is be open and curious and on the lookout for new paths and opportunities and follow your heart. wherever it takes you. i'm certain that in five years, i'll be exactly where i'm supposed to be, but i have no idea where that might be.

if i could tell my younger self anything, it would be "be generous with the daily moisturizer."

december 22 – travel: how did you travel in 2010? how and/or where would you like to travel next year?

i've been slowly ramping down on the travel since the madness of 180 travel days in 2007 and 2010 wasn't a big travel year for me. only three long-haul flights - our family holiday to the US last summer and two trips to manila in november. i'll retain some frequent flyer status on KLM as a result and i even think sabin managed to go silver. i haven't flown SAS at all, so i'll be an ordinary member next year for the first time in nearly a decade. but i'm less upset about that than i would have imagined. travel is important to me, because the new experiences bring me an energy and inspiration that i crave, but i learned this year that i can get that same dose of energy in other ways - taking the train to berlin for the weekend, working with the horse, walking along the beach at the west coast, stomping around our own acreage. i don't need a long-haul flight to achieve it (tho' don't me wrong, one once in awhile is a welcome thing).

in 2011, i'd like to take more journeys by train. and because sabin's turning 10, she gets to pick where we will go on holiday and she has chosen new york city. she wanted somewhere that none of us have been. so i guess that means at least one long-haul flight in 2011.

* * *

check out the reverb10 site for more prompts and to see who else is playing along.

in which she worries about the future

last night, we got home from playing cards with friends and started flipping through channels, as one does. we landed on an episode of law & order: SVU which featured a former IRA terrorist who had gone mercenary and was working for columbian drug lords since he was trained to kill and there wasn't so much killing to do anymore in ireland. so, very uplifting, as you might imagine, but a notch above the documentary on schools in germany which were training little super nazis in the years leading up to and during WWII that was on DR2.  during the commercials, husband was flipping to BBC world, where they were talking about years of strife in the congo on hardtalk. reminders of mubuto sese seko and laurent kabila and now his son flashed across the screen. why didn't i just walk away and curl up with mma ramotswe, you ask?

good question.

i sat watching these programs and i began to get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. i was glad sabin had fallen asleep and wasn't watching that kind of stuff. and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was for her sake. because sometimes i it makes me really ill to imagine the world she will inherit. what are we doing to our planet and ourselves? and are we just sitting here, letting it happen, as we watch it all unfold on t.v.?

there was a news recap on BBC during one of the breaks and they very dramatically and with a tone of indignation reported that russia had kicked out a couple of canadian diplomats from NATO offices in moscow. of course they did, that kind of thing happens all the time and the dudes were probably spies. which, if the editor choosing that story and the angle for that story had the slightest modicum of historical knowledge, would have been obvious. and then they would have realized it was actually really rather a non-story.

and this caused me to think of an article in information the other day about how few danish politicians (20%) think that studying the humanities (including history) is important. maybe i'm a bit touchier about this than most because i actually have a master's degree in humanities, but i think it's important to mankind's ability to sort out the world around us and make the right decisions. decisions of all kinds--but especially decisions relating to governing and how we treat one another and the planet (which cannot be done without governments cooperating). but we can't negotiate the waters as is necessary if we have no historical, sociological, cultural knowledge/background--all of which come from the humanities. it's good for us to read the classics and the so-called great books. it equips us with the necessary tools to think about things and sort them out and analyze and make good decisions. even editorial decisions like about whether it's a big deal or not that russia kicks out a couple of canadian diplomats.

and i worry that the world that sabin is inheriting isn't going to have people who are able to do that. i mean, if it's this bad now, how much worse will it get? where are the great thinkers today? the great ideas? the great philosophers? the great writers? as much as i respect and even like a guy like thomas friedman, who is arguably a public intellectual on the scene today, he's no kirkegaard. where are the people of that caliber today? where is today's dostoevsky? or voltaire? or byron? or thomas jefferson? where are the great men and women? instead we've got britain's got talent and madonna trying to adopt a kid in malawi and some asshole reporter asking some stupid football player what he thinks about climate change. we're asking all of the wrong people the wrong questions.

i want to shelter sabin from it, to keep that balloon before her face--so that what she knows is joy and laughter and all of the colorfulness there is in the world. but i know that balloon will rise and she'll have to face the mess we've left her with. and that just makes me feel sick to my stomach.

sorry for this uncharacteristically somber post, it's been grey and dreary all week and the world just gets me down sometimes.