I leave for Iceland tomorrow. My AirBnB just fell through so I only have my first night’s stay planned out of 5 total. I guess this is where my problem-solving abilities will need to kick in. I’m not feeling super comfortable. I’m tired from sleeping in various unfamiliar (though lovely) places for the past 10 days. I feel like when I get there, I’ll be fine, but right now the prospect of the unknown is looming over me like a dark cloud. I just have to keep remembering that this is the easy part of my journey. This is touristy Iceland, not the middle of the desert or the jungle in the Central African Republic or any place high on the human suffering scale.
I’m thinking about why I’m doing this in the first place (venturing so far from home, just because), and I’ve traced it back to a conversation I once had with one a documentarian friend. I told him I had been thinking about being a foreign correspondent for a while. And he looked at me and kind of chuckled and said: “If you want to be a foreign correspondent, go somewhere foreign and correspond.”
It was such a simple statement, one of those realizations that’s just so true, but the precipitating logic that finally causes the thought to take hold is so rare. Also, I just watched Inception so now I’m thinking about all the reasons people have told me to see it over the years and am trying to remember what they were trying to tell me in telling me to watch it. I think it must be the part about the way ideas take hold once they are seeded. I tend to grab hold of good ideas and run, consequences be damned. I mean, I hope that I will continue to run to good places where I don’t have to worry about consequences.
This is the easy part. I must not fear.
