Wandering through Nowhere

Anyone who probably reads my entries on this blog knows that I love travelling. I love the experience of visiting new cities, I love the experience of walking down streets without any idea of time or place, I love the sights, sounds and smells of a new restaurant in the middle of the city, I love walking briskly, stopping at opportune times to admire the buildings or the people around, I love sipping coffee and watching the nameless crowd pass me by, I love the feeling in your feet at the end of the day, the feeling that your feet turned into jello, that feeling is pure relaxation.
Last month I had the fortune of visiting my favorite city in the world. San Fransisco. SF is a city that consists of small pockets of entertainment. Each pocket is a neighbourhood that contains something unique and has a character and flavor of its own. Over looking the bay, the epicenter of the city is concentrated around a narrow radius. This uniquely positions it to be a tourists (Yes, I am not ashamed to be called this here) heaven. You could on a great day possibly walk the entire city. Of course you can't because after every other block, you will find something that catches your attention.
I will not attempt to describe everything that I saw here. There are travel blogs, and magazines that capture this city adequately. I captured images, and memories. Memories are fluids that continue to swim inside the corners of my brain, but images are concrete, those I can capture, and those I can share. I called this blog "Wandering through Nowhere" because  wanted the reader to feel like they are in a nameless city discovering it the same way I did.

Closed Doors

In the vortex of puzzles and riddles that surrounds us in everyday life, there are few moments of absolute clarity. These are short and fleeting and are nestled between many mazes and are in fact very difficult to discern. But when you do find these moments, life becomes a little more clearer. Have you ever solved a mathematical problem knowing the answer in advance? The difficult question automatically becomes very easy. Our subconsciousness somehow works a little bit faster. But what does that have to do with anything? Have I understood the key to the mysteries of life? Have I unlocked the door of wisdom and pursuit?

Kinda but not quite.

I saw a movie recently while I was on vacation. I will not go into the complexities of it but will say that I didn't enjoy it. It was long, meandering and really didn't seem to have a purpose. Maybe it was the noxious odor born out of the decades that the bricks aged in this crumbling old single screen theatre but this movie seemed to be a metaphor for my life, and that thought depressed me. There was a line in the movie, which in hindsight is perhaps the few moments of it that I actually remember, the line is "unless you love, your life goes by in an instant" or words to that effect. I would like to take that a bit further. I say that unless you have a dream, or a pursuit in life, your lifetime will flash by in an instant.

I think about that and am afraid. What is this dream that I pursue? What is my purpose in life? My goal? Is there One or are there many? Is everything fluid or are some dreams more concrete? Maybe dreams are not meant to be concrete, maybe they are manifestations of each person's frame of mind based on their circumstances. Maybe dreams are never meant to be realized. Maybe life itself is a dream.

These are all questions that I would love to know the answer to. But the answer does not lie in front of me, it is not wrapped in a nice box. It is not apparent. But I believe that the answer is out there for me to know. The answer is out there for me to pursue. In my wanderlust quest for the answer, I will find my dreams and I will discover answer to questions about myself and my dreams. That I believe is the true meaning of life. To open the closed doors of our hearts. This realization was the stroke of genius that I felt I saw. Some might say it was trivial or very obvious. They maybe right. It was not obvious to me. Things never are. But now I have the key, and the closed doors will not stay closed much longer.

Between Here and There

Its not very often that I stop enroute to somewhere during travel. Its not that I don't like it, its just that I get too caught up in the process of travelling that I forget that sometimes the best sights lie about 5 minutes away from the highway.

This cycle was broken last week during my travel to Michigan. Somewhere tucked off the side of the I-90 exists St. Joseph's Park also called as Silver Lake Beach. Time did not permit extracting the full flavor of this location, but what we saw definitely interested us in coming back. This is a beach town and the fact that we stopped here in the dying days of summer seems almost poetic. We ate some hummus and had a Margarita pizza (surprisingly good) and then headed back to the car and continued on our path back home.

Sometime in the future, I would love to return to this quaint town, return and sing an ode to the sunlight and the heat mirages doused by the fountains of the silver lake.