For the past few days, my mom has been asking whether everything is confirmed. More or less — visa, foreign currency, backpack and luggage, a few more things I still need to buy. Pack it all up and it should be fine.
But there’s still a vague unease. Three weeks. Hanoi in, Bangkok out. Only two nights of accommodation confirmed; most of the itinerary undecided. I’ve sketched a few possible routes on the map and a handful of towns that look interesting — the rest will follow instinct. I chose this deliberately. But does that count as being ready?
It mirrors my life lately. Compared to before, I used to be able to decide very firmly which fields I wanted to explore, which courses to take, which activities to join. Now I can see many, many directions — I have some interest in all of them — but less motivation to plan any of them carefully. Decisions come suddenly, and I follow whatever feels right: like returning to attend a social enterprise program last year, taking a Spanish anthropology course last semester, and now this trip. So when friends ask what I’m going to do, I find it harder and harder to give a definite answer.
At the same time, I understand that this kind of exploration — this latitude — is not something I can take for granted. It’s only possible at this particular moment in time. I don’t yet have to run into the anxiety of entering the workforce; I don’t have to worry about daily expenses. I’m in the transitional space between a starting point and a destination, with a lot of time available for drifting.
Maybe this trip will become an important node in my life. Or maybe it won’t — maybe it’ll just be a temporary escape from routine, living in a different place for a while.
I’ve noticed that as I get older, as I encounter more and experience more, the depth of each individual event seems to get diluted. I find it harder to have a single sentence, a single person, or a single event completely overturn my thinking or drastically change my direction. Instead, it feels more like the seven-piece tangram puzzle from childhood: you can’t make anything out of a single piece. You pick them up as you walk, and only on some night when you happen to be sorting through the pieces — arranging them without any preset image in mind — do you realize that what you’ve accumulated can actually form a pattern like this.
I don’t know what will happen on this trip or what I’ll come across; I have no way to predict or know in advance. I may need to wait until the moment I return to Taiwan — or much later — to properly understand what any of it means.
I want to be fully present, so I’ll be logging off all social media for a while. If you need to reach me, Messenger or LINE will find me.
More than that — maybe we can find a time to catch up in person afterward, and fill each other in on how things have been going.
