A Day in the Life of Chaos

I stopped enjoying traveling for work a long time ago.   In retrospect, how can anyone top flying in a Vietnam era helicopter with the door open watching parrots fly over the South American jungle? To those that are set in their daily routines the idea of going someplace and getting paid for it is enticing.  It is a chance to stay in nice hotels and visit different places all on the dime of another.  I suppose it was once that way for myself but now it feels like a dreadful chore I can't wait to get over.   There is a difference between traveling when you can be yourself, free to go when and where you want and the cold realities of business travel.  Traveling as part of a job leaves little time for personal pleasures and has a goal of simply accomplishing a task.  There is also a great difference between traveling with a friend or a lover with whom you can share a memory and traveling by yourself.   For me, solitary travel when you are not destined to meet a friend on the other end

Something about traveling changes a person.  This is especially true when the traveling reaches beyond the boundaries of our own lands.  I think if one were to get mathematical about the whole thing the formula might read something like: Familiarity = Comfort Comfort = Complacency Complacency = Ignorance When we journey out of our comfort zone the results can be unpredictable at best.  Sometimes we reach a feeling of enlightenment, sometimes we become depressed.  Sometimes when we return to our normal state we find that what was once normal has changed. Many of the feelings confronted depend on how far from our comfort zone we journey.  Feelings about ourselves and our lives might vary little if we went abroad to Canada yet traveling to South East Asia, Africa or China can result in an enormous re-evaluation of who we are and where we fit into the world around us. A few days ago I returned from a trip to the Far East.  It was largely a family trip to the Philippines punctuate