Nothing Butt

When I made a commitment to post once a week, I assumed seven days would be long enough to accumulate blog fodder. Surely, in that enormous stretch of days, something worthy of reporting would occur. Turns out I was wrong. In the life I live now, it is possible for me to go a very long time without encountering one blog worthy situation. This week, I am reduced to writing a post about nothing.

My life wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I lived a frantic corporate life, teetering on the edge of disaster like a juggling unicyclist.  It was exciting, in a twisty way. I was important. Civilization as I knew it depended on the overtime I worked. The entire financial structure of the western world, according to my boss, relied on the programs I de-bugged and the code changes I installed. For weeks at a time, I lived on stale nachos, burnt coffee and wine gums from the vending machines in the break room.

One day, my boss told me the company had decided to replace my life’s work with third-party software. I would have to re-educate myself, or I’d be out of a job.  He didn’t actually tell me to my face; he sent me an e-mail. I looked at the hundreds of unread e-mails still in my inbox, probably from people who were unaware the systems they were complaining about had been consigned to the trash can, and stepped away from the keyboard. It was time to rethink my life.

There is no better way to explore one’s horizons than travel. I threw some clothes into a couple of suitcases – okay I threw in a lot of clothes  – and took off, with no real idea of where I was going. Within two months I was down to one, half-full suitcase and a credit card. I took trains and ships and buses to places I’d never heard of and met the most interesting people under the oddest circumstances. One afternoon I’d be playing cowbell with a street percussion band. The next night I’d be sitting in the plush velvet, balcony seat of a famous theatre catching a performance of Riverdance. Two weeks later, I’d be sipping white Zinfandel at the topside bar on a cruise ship, listening to live jazz and watching the Panama Canal glide by.

Civilization, amazingly, did not collapse without me, and my life was now thrilling, a kaleidoscope of places and faces and fabulous adventures. Stops became shorter and journeys became longer, until one day, I woke up and found myself in India with a bank account the size of a peanut and a travel addiction that made crack cocaine look like herbal tea.  

There are no twelve step programs for travel addiction. Unlike alcohol or crystal meth, travel is generally considered to be a good thing. For a time, I went back to work and fed my habit with a Eurorail pass, but there is only one real step on the road to recovery for a travel addict: off the precipice of bottoming-out. And so it was for me. I woke up one morning, in India again, with half my hair and most of my bank account gone. It was time to re-invent myself once more.

So now I live a small-town life in rural Ontario. Between bouts of writing, I fill my days with nature (saw a fox chasing a rabbit through a snow field yesterday) and volunteer hours at the library (had a wobbly moment on Tuesday when I helped a woman print out her e-ticket to Cuba) and knitting (anyone need a fuzzy hat?).  In many, many ways, this is the best life I’ve lived so far. It’s certainly the healthiest, in the sense that my stress levels are way down and there’s no danger of malaria or dengue fever.  I have the time, if I so desire, to flatten my butt in an easy chair for hours on end,  doing absolutely nothing. Which is what I did this week, and why you are reading this totally uninformative post. I have nothing butt.

Admit it. You thought I wouldn’t be able to work that in, didn’t you?