The Universe and Us

The universe has such a way of throwing a spanner into your plans, just as you think you’ve got them down pat. Thankfully, the spanner that’s been thrown into my plans happens to be a fairly attractive one. So I’m not going to America, though I thought I would. That doesn’t mean I’m staying put in this country. It only means I’ll continue to be around intermittently, here, and mostly within a 400km radius of my city; it means I’ll be doing a fair amount of travelling, for work, over the coming year, and the years to come.

I suppose for all that planning, I never really thought I would go, at least not yet—it’s a truly exciting time to be where I am now, doing what I’m doing, in my neck of the woods. Stuff happened, mostly: I recently landed the opportunity to do a handful of truly exciting things, things that don’t often fall into your lap, things I would hate to give up and not see through. Several things, at that. America seemed less and less appealing; America will always be there. I’d still go, someday. Just not now.

Out here in my part of the world, things are happening, and I happen to be of the opinion I’m perfectly placed to play some part in all this. India, where I’m most comfortable, where I’m in my element, India with the one million stories waiting for me back there, the India I keep returning to time and again in writing, in photography, and now, in screenwriting. China; the thought of which draws a blank, but I suspect a lot of my work in the near future will revolve around it.

It feels like there’s no better time to be here in Asia, to take all that I’ve been doing one step further and to make it my life. The combination of things I’m currently pursuing are, at a glance, disparate, loosely associated projects, but I know for a fact they merge the loves of my life—food, travel, photography, writing, India, China, and the web. That should be enough for now. That this combination of disparate projects will, over the span of the coming year and the next, put me in just about every major Asian city, island, and remote town, is an added bonus. That I’m making reasonable amounts of money doing things I love, without actually needing to be in a specific geographical location at any one time, without needing to be at an office, without needing to be anywhere at all… is more than I can ask for. In addition to what stands to be a big break for my career, what’s more important about all these opportunities is that I am learning a ton from some of the best in the business; some truly outstanding people have displayed rather irrational amounts of trust in this rookie, and they continually challenge me creatively, as well as help fine-tune my technique, amongst other things.

What lies ahead, I’ll be honest, is scary. I am very good at pretending I have it all under control, but the truth is, I’m as scared as I should be. Money. Career. Family. Love. More Career. Broad strokes and gleaming opportunities are present in each, but I’m at that point in my life where I need to actively take those important steps, to take myself further than I usually would, in order to build concrete things. That means drawing up financial plans, in the hopes of not only being solvent and being in the black, but… profitable (the plan is to make ridiculous amounts of money doing what I love; how? i don’t know, but i’ll figure it out). That means keeping the faith, and trying to keep at what I do even if it might not make sense to the people around me, even if at one point I began to lose hope thinking I should do something easier, safer. It means achieving some new clarity on the things and people that are important to me, and behaving in a manner that reflects these changes. Within the next year or so, I stand an equal chance of suffering altitude sickness, being thrown into a Chinese jail, and catching a mind-boggling array of tropical diseases from ten, maybe more, Asian countries. As well as an equal chance of having my weakness for fine restaurants and fine hotels fed fairly regularly, in the name of work, to balance off my days of $5 rooms and hard travel. With an incredibly smart, funny, and hot woman by my side. How is all this possible at all? I’m not sure. I said stuff happened. Life got good. Life got terribly exciting. I got lucky, in life and in love. There’s method in the madness, I’m starting to realize.

That I’m headed here for the coming weekend can’t hurt either.