Theorizing the pause

So, I'm planning to spend the rest of January and February in Ireland and England.  I'm visiting friends and returning to old haunts, and also spending a goodly amount of time renewing myself in the spiritual home to me that is the Wild Atlantic Way, the west coast of Ireland.  And I'm so grateful to be able to be here again.  But it is verily a strange thing to be in such familiar places after Central Asia and Cambodia. My general feeling right now is an extension, even an intensification, of what I was feeling in New Zealand: that it's almost too easy to be in places that accommodate themselves so readily to me.  

(Out on the Burren)

I confess that during the first stretch of my travels, I got accustomed to adventure, to being confronted daily with things I did not understand and with problems (even small ones relating to my not speaking Kazakh, for instance) I had to solve.  Am I admitting to something as shallow as being proud of myself for being able to figure things out on the fly?  I'm not sure.  It felt more like exhilaration, that sense of being constantly having to learn and adapt, like a set of challenges that kept daily life from ever settling into mundanity.  And did I get addicted to the adrenaline of it all?  Yes, certainly I did--but that's not really much of a surprise given my natural affinity for that excellent drug.  I wonder if it's impossible-- logistically, financially, even physiologically--to be adrenalized all the time.  I'm trying to think of this more restful period not as tapping out but as an opportunity to process before the next set of challenges.

(The Poulnabrone Dolmen, Neolithic wedge tomb dating to about 6000 years ago)

To keep myself from settling into the mundane, though, I'm spending loads of time outside, even better if the weather is wild.  When I was younger, I used to work in the Burren, in County Clare, and its limestone moonscape offers miles and miles of exploration terrain.  What it lacks in altitude it makes up for in wind and treachery: ask me about the time in 1993 when I gave myself stitches after falling through a grike and opening my skin down to the shinbone.  A different kind of exhilaration.  I have carried a needle and thread in my backpack ever since.

(Hiking on Mullaghmore, elevation 600 feet! LOL, with its awesome swirly geology)