After almost two solid days of travel, on May 26 we land tired but smiling with two ripped bags at San Francisco’s international airport. We are home. My pulse is up and I experience each breath as we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the highway 101 corridor to our home in Healdsburg. Over the years I’ve experienced culture shock when returning home from far-away peoples and lands, not going to them. Now is no exception. ‘The real voyage of discovery is to see with new eyes’ and all the experiences over the past year – people, places, cultures, languages, economies, foods and lives – are inviting me to consider my life at home anew.
First, there are the practical considerations. How are our family and friends doing? When is the right time to reengage with Blu Skye? Paloma, our dog was ill when we were away, will she remember us? How has our home on the hill and off the grid faired?
Then there are the less practical considerations. What are the lessons to be learned and applied from our trip? Will everything just be the same after a day or two? How am I different from when I left?
I’ve been home now for a month and understand the difficulty of putting all that has happened into a few words. Everyone asks a version of the ‘how was your trip’? A reasonable enough question to which there is no clear answer. So we all answer a version of ‘it was great.’ Something important did happen out there in the big wide world. But I suspect its lessons will reveal themselves at unsuspected moments over the years to come. In the meantime, a response to the question about the trip is warranted. What did I learn? What did I discover? What are the implications for work and life?
Personally, I’ve grown as a father, husband and hopefully, more generally as a person. Relationships feed on shared experiences and we’ve fed them well on this trip. Think about it. Almost 24 hours a day with your significant other and child for 300 plus days. From the endless games of gin rummy and banangrams; to hundreds of rooms, beds and bathrooms – some regal, many just this side of sketchy; to cold late night walks through dusty impenetrable neighborhoods searching for a train; to drives of hundreds of miles through empty desert without seeing other cars; to close encounters with wild animals in dozens of landscapes; to a nighttime border crossing from Zambia to Zimbabwe during a power outage; to reconnecting with old and new friends in four continents, we have done everything together. I’ve seen how adaptable we are, that curiosity keeps you humble, that calculated risk keeps you young, and that being together matters.
Professionally, I’m inspired. From the creation of national parks in Chile, to the creative reuse of coke bottles in Namibia, to rethinking commodity markets in Ethiopia to help small family farms, to the practical application of a ‘Gross National Happiness’ index in Bhutan, to aid used to finance a women’s coop bakery in Malawi, to the resilience of people to survive in a totally collapsed economy in Zimbabwe, to the bizarre dance of the Blue Footed Boobie in the Galapagos that lives on today because of innovative conservation policies. I’ve seen the principles underlying the sustainability movement applied in so many different ways, by so many different people, in so many different places. It is a movement. I’ve learned that morally and practically it doesn’t work to tell people who have little and want more that they can’t have it. I’ve observed that there are billions of people in the world who fall into this category. I’ve learned to question technological based solutions without a corresponding transformation of consciousness. I’ve experienced the results of horrible ecological damage, and the incredible ability for landscapes and life to resurrect under the right conditions. I’ve reinforced my belief that business and the capitalist system are the acupuncture points to encourage global transformation. Fundamentally, I’ve seen that leadership matters.
Spiritually, I’ve come to see the wisdom in the trees and that love matters. Fear-based, revolutionary change of one’s life, family, community or country doesn’t work to create anything really new. Change born of fear, anger and hate simply recreates what it overthrows. The oppressed become the new oppressors. The Buddhists got it right: change is the nature of everything; we try and create permanence; grasping for that is painful; freedom is found in release and acknowledgment of what’s so.
At the end of the day I’m humbled by the privilege I have had to experience this trip of a lifetime and only hope that I can model the awe and humility required to live, really live, in this mysterious, wild world.
