Because I'm 36 and I Can

Today I turn 36. At this age, I can stop squandering my time making desperate lunges at happiness.  I can simply saunter through life, reveling in the mundanity of unfettered existence.

An imp that delighted in self-contradiction

I had often thought that the mind was, quite literally, a devil’s advocate, an agent of diabolical sophistry that could argue any point and its opposite with equal conviction; an imp that delighted in self-contradiction and yet, though full of sound and fury, ultimately signified nothing. None of the truest things in life — like love or faith — was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder. Too often, I thought, the rational faculty tended only to rationalize, and the intellect served only to put one in two minds, torn apart by second thoughts.

~Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, 1991

58 Countries

58! That’s the number of countries a Philippine citizen can travel to without a visa according to the Henley and Partners Visa Restriction Index 2013.  Having been to only a few of those countries, I can still visit 49 nations without applying for a visa. And among these 49 countries are Morocco, Israel, Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, Laos, and Myanmar—all the places I’ve always wanted to explore. There are just too many places I dream of visiting but not enough time and financial resources to turn the dream into reality.

It is now the middle of January, and I’m frantically making travel plans for our next trip.  North Africa is too foreign a place that I can’t simply go there and wing it.