Reading over the old to create the new

A burst of creativity always strikes when you have other things that you should be doing. I will call this "procrastination art". I'd like to think of it as being a real talent, maybe just because I spend so much time doing it that I'd rather consider it a positive activity rather than a pure waste of time.

I realised looking through previous posts that I really did run out of thoughts and time along my travels. Big gaps in places and not wholly satisfying descriptions/narratives/anecdotes of my travels. I think it's hard in this kind of situation because you want to make what you're writing about interesting but without getting so personal that you're revealing too much of yourself. It's got to be more than just a description of what you've done and what you've seen and where you've been. Because that's not interesting and if I was going to just do that then I'd just list places and monuments etc. And what makes it even harder is that you're always pushed for time when you're travelling, so you only have 10 minutes here or 30 minutes there, and you're never quite sure of when you'll next get internet!

So I feel like overall I wish I'd written a little more to remember things by. I have photos too, but I suppose that's not quite the same. Did I manage to get down what I was thinking or feeling at certain times? I think it's important to be able to learn from my experiences. And travelling, particularly travelling solo, is the perfect opportunity to be able to explore thoughts, feelings, ideas that you've had gestating in the deep, dark recesses of your subconscious. You come away from it all knowing more about yourself. Or maybe you come away having figured out something that's niggled at you for a long time.

What did I bring away from all of this? That you can't always plan really far into the future and that's ok. Feelings of instability and insecurity are fine, and not knowing where you might be in 5 years is acceptable too. It'll all come in time, and until it does, there's no point stressing yourself out more by worrying. This is not, however, the same as doing nothing and leaving everything to pure chance/luck/fate/ whatever you want to call it! It's more accepting that you don't know everything right now and that's all right.

This is more of an LJ post than anything else, but lacking the ability to access LJ, I'm left with this. I suppose it's an overshare for a travel blog post but I need to put it somewhere!