Mumbai Mind Meld

So here I am ready to leave India and come back to my old life, and I am starting to think about happiness. How far will I go for it. Do I really care about it, do I really care about myself? Will I try anything to get a piece of it? Do I know what it is and will I stop when it comes to me and asks me to stay? Am I truly open to any possible path to happiness? No matter how my mind may judge it? Or will I spend my life comfortable, safe and be happy with that smooth glide to death. Chasing an impossible dream or a photo of a real city scape in Mumbai?

I think I will lead a more creative life at home now that I am no longer working for someone else. But life in DC has never fulfilled me. It has never all come together there for me. Is it a women I love and a Family that I am missing? Is that somekind of cherry on top of all your accomplishments in life that makes them even better? Or not so stressful? Or so important? Is it somekind of anchor or purpose or intention for your life's movements? Is that something that I need to find?

I feel so good eating dinner at my sister's with her new husband Michael. I wish I could get into the weekly routine of eating with them once a week but I can't. I love their lives they made for themselves. I feel so good sitting next to my mother at her house especially last summer before I went for a mountain bike ride on my old training grounds that I had not been on in years. These things I am wanting to do more and more often in my life, as I get older.

It started last March when I started mountain biking again, the first time since 1995. The muscles remembered, and they changed me back to who I was?! I have been looking back lot at the life I had before my career, before the last 12 years of AOL, looking hard at the changes that have happened since I was that person. The changes in my hometown, the changes in the faces of my old friends. Something is going on inside of me, something big, and I have no real clue about what it is or where it is taking me. And this trip comes along and I am taking pictures in faraway cities with one of my best friends. Doing something I used to do when I was that person before my job. Trespassing and Photography, definitely an old hobby of mine that calmed me and made me happy. All the buildings I used to get into in Baltimore are gone, it's all changed since the mid-90's. Now I am sneaking into the back of the Bangkok Mcdonalds to get to the roof to get a nice elevated evening shot of some round about with a statue in the middle. Strange. Full circle. And I am now thinking about happiness again. And how far I will go for it. I want to know how far I will go to be happy. How much zest I have left in the freezer. I really want to know if I truly want to be fulfilled in this lifetime.

The train fills up so tight from Vashi toward Mumbai Central, it is so packed I think I am touching 6 people simulataneously, and I think to myself how can I ever make it here. The crowd drastically subsides a few stops down the line at Govandi or so, and it gets airy and nice again, and people are looking at me and I am smiling at them and they are smiling back. And I am ready for a few more weeks of this place and its warmth and vitality. I always wanted to be an expat, and I thought so much for myself years ago before my career happened to me, and now that I am unravelling the last 12 years I am coming back to these old dreams and the person I always though I was to become, and maybe this ties in with this striving for happiness at any cost. Maybe this is how I find myself? I am no longer starting or end anything, I am in the middle of everything now, and it feels incredible, and I know nothing, and I just smile, because I have nothing to say. It all just rolls around in my head and tickles my tummy as I start to comprehend it and like some dislexia these fragments of the secrets of the universe turn incoherent. And I laugh, and I try not to look so hard at these things in my head. I like that I am becoming the person I was before AOL. I hated that place, I hated the money and how lazy I got and how arrogant I was, and how dead inside I was. I am so glad it is over, I just want to cry. Cry away the shit of it. And I am still in India, crying and all, and it is getting more comfortable everyday and I feel more love here from stranges than I have anywhere else on earth. Especially from Priyanka.
Dino