It sometimes occurs to me that I’m doing too much. I’m trying to learn too many things before I master one of them, or I’m going to too many places too quickly, so much so that even the travel notes I keep lack a certain permanence and familiarity. Most of the friends I write of are friends of a particular hobby or people I get together with in passing. Even the careers I build are fast-tracked into a successful cycle of growth and expansion followed by contraction and resettlement. It doesn’t stop because I don’t stop. I miss out on the sense of acceptance and security that seems to help a lot of people get by.

But then, I think, but then there’s all the things I won’t do unless I get my ass in gear. I won’t get Kyoto miso soup in my moustache, or lounge in a hot spring in Reykjavík, or have a week-long affair in someone’s tent at the base of Mt. Everest. I won’t purchase and fly the Cessna I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid.

If I’m honest, I can’t handle thinking of the things I didn’t get to do. I don’t let go of things so easily and, one way or another, they’ll each eat away at me, until I’m beyond bitterness and into something like defeat.