After some amazing adventures in Tasmania, arriving in Melbourne was dismal to say the least. The countless trams and city streets reminded me of San Francisco, and I could not help but feel like I had travelled to the other side of the world only to arrive in a city that reminded me of home.
Tasmania was three weeks of living in the moment. My biggest life decisions were: do I want to go hiking or spend the day at the beach? Should we cook dinner now or later? Nights of camping felt limitless, and the future shined like the sun, a beautiful luminosity with a powerful magnitude that you would never have to confront outright ...or hopefully never.
When I arrived in Melbourne, five months of travel caught up to me like a sickness. The first two weeks in a new city were lucid and panicky, like holding my breath under water. This is the secret that travellers never mention: the exhaustion. Find a job. Find a place to stay. Figure out your way around the city. Stay positive. Smile. Employers love happy people. Act confident. Stay focused. Don't get stressed out. Don't get stressed out. Don't get stressed out.
The exhaustion is physical too. When you are staying in hostels, couch surfing at friends' houses, and camping for nights on end, you never really feel clean. I mean, you do feel relatively clean, but you never feel three star hotel room, fresh white towel, mini shampoo and conditioner clean. You certainly do not feel routine lifestyle, leave in defrizzer, favorite fluffy pink bathrobe clean. The cleanliness that you feel is akin to a badly mopped bar room floor, the dirt is merely pushed around to appear clean and no one seems to notice it, but you do.
Then there is that voice inside your head with that evil, threatening, ominous question. The what if question. What if I can't find work, and I can't support myself, and I have to fly home, and move in with my parents, and I can't find work back home either and then one day I wake up and I am forty-five-years-old and I still live with my parents and I have no money and no drivers license and no friends and nobody loves me and everybody hates me and I die an excruciatingly slow death which begins when I am healthy and takes decades to commence and nobody comes to my funeral and five minutes after I die I am neither loved nor hated; I am only forgotten. Okay. Breathe. Breathe. We are above water again. Everything is okay. Don't get stressed out. Nothing has happened yet. Just breathe.
Months ago, in Sydney, I met an Irish guy with a tattoo that said: "The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time." When I asked him who originally wrote it he gave me a condescending you-should-already-know-this look, before answering: "Abraham Lincoln." Now, don't get me wrong, I understand that I did not know Abe all that well, but that quote just did not sound like something he would have said. Also, there was the absurd fact that I learned about a quote by a great American president because it was tattooed on some Irish guy's bicep. Anyway, the words stuck with me and I liked them so much that I asked Google and yes, Abraham Lincoln did in fact say this:
"The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time."
I like it. I know that it is a bit cliche. I like it anyway. It makes sense to me and it relaxes me.
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