After a slightly rocky transition from travel to vacation mode, as noted by Alex below, an exceedingly pleasant week was passed in the sunny, relaxing, and generally decompressing beach community of Thong Nai Pan Noi. Eating regularly at select locally run restaurants, playing volleyball daily with the same local kids, and meeting great Thais and tourists alike, I felt the week to be, as hoped for, a culmination to the past 80 or so days of travel.
Keeping the 2,000 baht in my large pack rather than on my person wasn't the smartest move, but secreting it away in the recesses of a small, locked pouch seemed sufficient to deter any would-be thieves through the duration of our 11-hour bus ride back to Bangkok. Not so, evidently.
The theft, while certainly discouraging my recently renewed enthusiasm for Thailand, served another and undoubtedly more useful function. Having been robbed of slightly more money at the very start of the trip, on a similar bus en route to Northern Thailand, this morning's financial collapse brought the entire trip to an odd sort of conclusion.
I met an Italian man in a restaurant today. He has been travelling around the world for 12 years, funded primarily by certain fortunate stock decisions. At a certain point of our unanticipatedly lengthy talk in Italian - his fluent and mine rather broken - we came around to wrapping up our divergent conversational strains. He offered a rather pithy bit of unifying philosophy: it's not important what life gives you; what's important is how you respond to it.
Two thousand baht is not a lot of money in my personal grand scheme; it will get me two days' rent in New York City. But together with the similar occurrence at the start of this trip, it's given me a chance to reflect on how I've responded to the overwhelming stimuli of the past two and a half months, punctuated by these two nearly identical endpoints.
Because, as the Italian said, it's not what life gives you, it's how you respond to it.
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2 comments:
And as Bob Dylan once said, "when you ain't got nothing, you ain't got nothin' to loose."
So far on my trip I've lost: a flashlight, my favorite wool cap, my DL, a pair of socks, I shattered the lens filter on my camera, and two umbrellas in two different cities.
I'm slowly working my way to having nothing as well.
I think I'm going to take that Italian's advice and study the stock market.
The Italian is right. Despite how much we prepare and think we are in control, so much of what we face in our lives is the result of chance and randomness. We can try but ultimately no one controls what gets handed to us. And it's frustrating, enervating and a waste of time and resources to try to have a detailed plan for every eventuality. Better to have a more sophisticated and comprehensive 'Plan" that will work in all cases. And that, my friend, is all about attitude, approach, emotionality. Many ways of saying it but it all boils down to spending more time and effort working from the inside out and not being overly impacted and influenced by the whims and vicissitudes of life. It may sound corny but we all get one life and that's the only we have ANY control over. Be caring, sympathetic and helpful when you can but you can't control what the other six billion souls are up to. You can only focus on your own makeup, development and how you want to live your life in relation to whatever else is out there.
But you knew that already.
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