Miles to go before I sleep

and only 27 minutes before i post for this month. i've been back from ethiopia for 5 days, i leave for mexico in two. earlier today i was essentially frozen in panic on the inside while apparently moving normally and interacting with people on the outside. there is a lot to do and somehow it will get done. i no longer feel as bad about the sheer amount of flying i'm doing. this year, even just the first 7 months, and certainly the first eight, could set a new record. it seems to fly in the face of so many things i believe in, to continue to fly, especially for fun, but right now i have resigned myself to it and it's what's happening for me, and perhaps needs to happen for a while, so so be it. it is strange and difficult to get rid of something that i grew into maturity, rather than grew up, loving and enjoying so much. i love flying itself, i love lifting off the ground, the miracle, it never fails to inspire and astonish, even after what might be hundreds of flights. confess my carbon sins indeed. and while i like the flying, i love the going. i love going to different places. i feel in fact more at ease in motion than being still, i feel part of what has made me unhappy the last few years has been a loss of movement, an enforced stationaryness, in many senses. i feel happy, it feels normal, to come and go, to go to places. i have for a long time loved the transformatory power of getting on a plane and in a few hours, it seems like moments, being in a different place, diffferent culture, different reality, a sense that this one world contains so much, that nothing is permanent, unbearable, unchangeable, when a mere matter of geography can change everything so very much. realised that power at a young age has helped me through so many times, because it provides perspective, it tells me that whatever is happening here, so much of it is circumstance, timing, location, particularity - things do not have to be this way, some amount of motion distant is another existence which through chance and aeronautical engineering, i can enter, i can visit, i can even stay. it runs deep in me, this travelling truth. this does not square at all with the tonnes of carbon released, the destruction and energy needed to get the plane in the air and me on it, with travelling thousands of miles sometimes for only days or weeks. but the gut feeling, hard as it is to believe a gut feeling comes from something so recent in human history, that feeling is hard to shake. somewhere humans were always in motion perhaps. something to explore on this journey. let's see where it takes me.