Folks who have jobs involving travel, I would love your feedback on this one.

For those unaware, I was essentially a nomad from the end of May 2007 until March 2008.

While I walked across the stage with everyone else in May, the piece of paper I was handed was not in fact my diploma, but was instead essentially an I.O.U. from the school.  Due to some crazy stuff straight out of a movie in the last month of my schooling, I had to take an extension on my thesis, to be finished in September.  Since I had planned on going to Korea ASAP after finishing school, my new, reworked plan involved me shifting that timeline to begin in September.  In the meantime, I went to Switzerland, Holland, and Belgium for six weeks (mostly Switzerland).  My final year at Hampshire had been extremely stressful (and resulted in one professor being fired and another being put on probation), and the relaxation time was very welcome and well-needed.

When I got back, I finished up my thesis.  But, upon doing so, I was informed that I would not be able to get my diploma until they were printed in February.  Since Korean immigration requires your actual diploma in order to get an E-2 (teaching) visa, this meant that I would have to further delay my plans for Korea.  But, here I was, with somewhere between 5 and 7 months before I would be leaving the country.  It wasn’t a long enough period to warrant an apartment and job, but it was longer than I could justify mooching off any one friend or another.

My solution?  Travel.  Keep moving.  I packed 5 bins into the camper-covered back of my truck: one of summer clothes, another of fall clothes, another of winter clothes, one bin of reenacting gear, and one bin of miscellaneous accoutrements.  I drove around the country (and Canada) for the next 8 months, sleeping on friends’ couches and air mattresses and the occasional bare floor, sleeping in my car, in barns, and occasionally actual motels.  I had no plans.  My direction and itinerary was largely determined by chance and whim, and I rarely spent more than 2 weeks in any one given location.  Here is an example that I recently wrote up for a friend of mine:

So, on one Thursday in early November, I was in western Massachusetts (Amherst) with a friend, and then drove to Boston that night.  I was in Boston until Wednesday evening, at which point I then drove overnight to Washington DC, arriving Thursday morning.  Friday afternoon Marc and I started driving 14 hours to Charleston, South Carolina for a reenactment.  We arrived Saturday morning, and slept in my car at the event on Friday night, due to complications with sleeping arrangements.  We drove back Sunday.  I was in DC that week, and then Friday afternoon Marc and I drove to a tiny town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsyvania, slept in a barn that night at a reenactment.  Saturday afternoon we left the reenactment, and slept in a motel near Gettysburg that night, so that a friend of his could pick him up in the morning.  I dropped him off in Gettysburg that morning, then tried to drive to NYC, but got too late a start.  So, from on the road, I called a friend in Philadelphia and she let me sleep on her floor for a night.  The next day I gave up on seeing my friend in NYC, and went back to western Mass, with the intention of staying a few days.  But, the friend whose couch I stay on out there was going out of town, so I couldn’t stay.  So, I decided that I’d drive up to Quebec and spend Thanksgiving there, to avoid all the traffic that would be crazy in the US.  Originally I was just going to drive straight through to Quebec City, but it was late, so I stopped in Montreal and ended up staying there for 2 days.  Then I was in Quebec City for…8 days?  Then I drove back to Boston, then two days later drove back to DC.  By that time it was the beginning of December.  I spent from about mid-first week of Dec until the end of the second week in DC, then flew to Texas, spent the second two weeks and Christmas in Houston, then on the 30th, I was flown to Chicago to attend a friend’s new years party.  Then, the morning of the 2nd, I flew back to DC, and then the morning of the third, Marc and I drove up to Quebec City (about 15 hours of driving) and were there for about 10 days.  Then we came back, had two days in DC, and then drove out that Friday morning to a reenactment near the western border of Kentucky (18 hours) for the weekend, headed back towards DC that Saturday evening and arrived back around mid-morning.  I then spent the next week and a half in DC, then went back to Boston.  So, there you have about 2.5 months of my year.  The rest of it was similarly nuts.

Why am I telling you this?  Well, I have been doing a lot of intellectual soul-searching recently, and I keep coming back to thoughts of that year.  While I did burn through quite a good deal of money, I feel that that year had probably more influence over my life than most of my years of college put together.  You see, nomadism runs pretty strongly in my family.  My maternal grandmother used to drive from Houston to Chicago all the time when she was young, and my paternal grandfather visited all but a few countries in the world before he died.  My parents traveled extensively when they were young (especially my mother, who lived in Holland and Germany for awhile), and we traveled extensively as a family when I was a kid.

Recently, I have been considering both this and my nomadic year quite a bit, and it has resulted in me asking myself some questions that I don’t really know the answer to.  While I have disliked living in Korea, I have enjoyed living overseas.  Before I settled on Korea, I also looked at Turkey, Russia, and Slovenia, and I have always said that I want to live in Switzerland some day.  I have to wonder: will I ever be truly happy staying in one place?  I have moved 19 times in 8 years.  This semi-nomadic lifestyle is by this point pretty entrenched in both my personality and, frankly, my psyche.  After awhile in one place, I get this urge that it’s time to leave, time to learn about somewhere new.  I often imagine myself living quietly in a rural community somewhere in the northeast area, but I have to wonder; am I just fooling myself because of some societal notion that people can only be happy when they are settled somewhere?  Can someone who flourishes in new environments ever fit in as a stationary being?  Marc was a foreign service brat when he was growing up, and he has retained a love of travel, but will two weeks of vacation traveling a year ever really cut it?  I have become accustomed to doing a lot of traveling, and doing so frequently, and so will I be able to settle for only taking trips once, maybe twice a year?  If I end up being unhappy being in one place, what can I do?  What jobs are open to me?  What are my options?

These are all questions that only time can answer.  That doesn’t mean though that they are any less nagging in my mind, especially as I get closer and closer to finishing my time here in Korea.

When I started my year of nomadism, a friend gave me a book called Delaying The Real World.  The book was good, but the there seemed to be an underlying assumption that these were things to do for a couple years in your mid-twenties, before eventually settling down and starting “real life”.  I always wondered – why do you have to stop there?  Sure, you have to get a job, but why does your life necessarily have to be any less interesting than your time during this mysterious “delay”?  It is my firm belief that life should be exciting, engaging, meaningful.  It’s just up to each person to decide what that means for them.

The million dollar question is: what does that mean for me?

Then again, Oscar Wilde once said “Life is far too important a thing to ever talk seriously about.” and I tend to agree with that sentiment.