Since I last blogged here I’ve been in Newport Beach, then back to Bend; then I drove down to San Francisco to see if we still had that old chemistry (we did). Drove back to Bend. Worked on my Bend vacation rental (which I link to here more for the search engines than for you, I’m afraid), and drove up to Seattle; met with some Earth Class Mail alumni (Rajeev, Ross, Steve) and Dr. Bob (whom I met 20 years ago while he was on a year-long sabbatical at Harvard and I was in law school), and continued to wonder if I might feel myself again anytime soon.
That’s something for a different post. My post here today is evidence that I have somehow triumphed over the inertia that considered a trip to Spain, in the midst of so much change, a sort of distraction from the real business of post-divorce: selling house, screwing up the courage to sell house now, deciding where to move (considered by some one of the most important decisions a person can make), selling contents of house, finding an apartment in a new city, packing, moving to the new city, building revised coaching and writing and entrepreneurial career in the new location, constructing a new social life, and so on. Oh, and stick a five-week trip to Spain in there somewhere.
But of course you will say that a month-long meditation through rural France and Spain is exactly the sort of “distraction” I need, and perhaps as much as I could possibly hope for. It would certainly go a long way toward slowing down the thoughts, the indefatigable thoughts, that motor through my mind. Dr. Bob believes, on the evidence of a recent dinner meeting, that I am engaged in “frenetic” activity. Perhaps that’s a nice word for “compulsive”?
I suspect that in time the timing of this trip will seem more providential than a scary disruption of some other ideas of life. It’s starting to feel one step closer to that way already . . .
Today I held my breath and took the step of booking myself for a five-week trip that
disconnects me from normal life, for better or for imagined worse. On September 16, I’m flying from Newark, NJ (month-long stay in Jersey City sponsored by Adam Weiss and his partner-level legal recruiting) to Bilbao, Spain, home of Frank Gehry’s world-famous Guggenheim Museum (and its contents, which people tend to forget about) and, as if that weren’t enough, home to our uber-trekker friend Julio (who has been on the Camino himself, and therefore has been silent for as long as I have been).
Once we walk from western France to northeastern Spain, it will be time for another kind of reward: European civilization, a defining passion of both Mom’s and mine. We decided today that we’ll head down through Porto, Portugal, home of Port wine, and then farther south, through the teeming cork fields (corks also invented in Portugal) to Lisbon, once home to a great empire and now one of Western Europe’s most affordable cities. On October 22, we’ll fly back, I to Newark and then to Bend, Mom and our new teenage companion (to be announced soon!) to Montrose.
In the meantime, let’s see how many of the questions I have receive an answer.
