Somewhere Over Apia

I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it. -Joan Baez

I’m somewhere over a tiny island called Apia with wifi on United Airlines. My head is pounding from lack of sleep. It is 8:44A back home and 2:44A in Melbourne where I am landing. It is -52 degrees fahrenheidt outside. Every time I fly, I am struck with the impossibility of it all. The fact that we are hurting at about 542 miles per hour through the sky, in a tube, with over 100 other people. We are all breathing the same filtered cabin air. We are all sitting as comfortably as we can in our seats. What an enormous privilege it is to be in the sky.

I have no business to be traveling at this point in time. I own a small business that is doing well, but not quite ‘international travel’ well. The only way I am able to afford trips like this is through travel points, which accumulate rather quickly on business credit cards. It is a funny thing, the guilt that accompanies traveling as a small-business owner. The preconceived notion that small businesses should be tied to their work, like farmers, like artists, and not able to leave. I don’t know if it is just me putting that pressure on myself, or if there is some sort of set expectation that we hold the ‘service industry’ to.

Either way, I am embarking on this trip with the eagerness of a 9-5er who is taking their annual vacation. While mine is not paid, I do feel confident about the shop and the women I have running it. I updated the employee manual, set clear expectations, and have three sets of hands and eyes on the shop while I am away. I trust these ladies to show up for the community while I am away. I have watched my business ebb and flow, and know I can make up for slow days of sales when I am home, and that my ‘job’ at the moment is to relish in the vacation I have carved for myself without feeling guilty. Easier said than done right? Sigh. Okay. Now to the vacation bit.

I feel a bit like a mom must feel when she hires a babysitter. Exhilirated and unsure what to do with the freedom. Who am I without the solidifying identity of ‘small business owner'.’ I was a million other me’s before this one, each of them a different iteration with a steadfast dedication to travel. I had no idea the luxury of being able to clock off work and be done with work. To be able to be completely and utterly left to whatever I chose to and wanted to do, knowing I had work and an income to return to tomorrow. Now, in my ‘free time’ I have to choose not to turn toward the pile of to-dos that my small business toddler demands. For now idyll can play with the aunties.

I was reading through blog posts from my last trip to Australia, and it looks like I planned the same sort of 30 minute layover that I am about to have in Melbourne. If all goes to plan, I’ll be boarding a plane to Hobart where my soul sister Nikki will be retrieving me from the airport, and we will be jetting straight down to the Peninsula. I am hesitant to talk about Tasmania because it is still so untouched, but in all seriousness I think I am giving my blog a bit too much credit to who might find it. Either way, Tassie calls to me. Beckons. Have you ever had that? A place that calls you to come home?

I must sleep a bit longer. Until tomorrow!

-Travel Han

Enough pens to write 4 novels.