Change

My time in the UK is coming to an end. My 6 month tourist visa expires at the end of August. It is now time for me to set my sights on what I will be doing in the future and where I will be going.

I find myself in a realm of constant fear and doubt. I wake up every morning and the first conscious thought that comes to mind evokes a feeling of deep rooted fear. My stomach tightens and churns, my heart rate quickens and I take a deep breath to try and ward it off. Though I cannot say for sure what it is that I fear, I can make guesses and say that it is my future or my health or death. Perhaps I fear that there will never again be a time when I wake up with a clear and fresh mind; a mind that has no worries and can live life in the moment.

Living life in the moment. Living for the here and the now. This is something that I cannot remember ever doing. I am always thinking about the future and what I need to do now to make myself happy later and in doing so, ruin the now. I can see this conundrum yet I do not know how to fix it. I can barely remember a time when I did not think and live like this. In fact, I am not even sure there was a time when I was not constantly thinking about the future and what it holds for me. Certainly every day of school was a daily means of torture in the now so that perhaps sometime in the future when I had a good job and a house and a family then I could start living life happily on a daily basis in the moment. It is hard to say what I thought, or rather, how I thought, prior to elementary school.

How do I go about thinking and living my life in a way that I have never experienced or known before? As long as I can remember everything I do in the now is a means to an end, but never the end itself. I want to live a life with purpose and meaning. I want to live life with a reason for being. I want purpose in the here and now. I cannot stand living out my days in fear, suffering and depression with only a slight glimmer of lighted hope off in the distance that perhaps some day I will figure all of this shit out and be at peace within. It seems as though the more time that passes and the more thought I give it the more that light dims. A fundamental change within seems like the only course of action. Yet at the same time I am afraid of doing so.

I fear that in change I will lose everything that I have and know. I fear the loss of my friends and family. I fear the loss of me and my identity. In essence, I fear that by changing how and what I think I will lose everything that is important and good in my life. It then becomes this never-ending struggle in my head of needing to change but not wanting to at the same time.

This trip is all about change. One reason I left home was to distance myself from all that I know so that change would be an easier task to accomplish. Yet here I am at my cousins in a place that feels safe and comforting doing things that feel helpful and noble feeling as though I am stuck.

And so, again I look towards the future and to the next spot on the map where my feet will fall. I now know that it will be Paris next. I will be there for a few days starting on the 10th of August. Then it is on to Germany where on the 16th I will start a volunteer workcamp helping a communal village; doing what, I am not exactly sure. After that, I am leaving my itinerary open with only one exception.

There is a volunteer place in China that I have found that is quite exciting for me. In my search for a volunteer experience I have been looking for something exactly like this. The place is called The Wuzhi Experiment and here is the website. Given the opportunity, I would leave straight from the Germany after this upcoming volunteer position is completed for Wuzhi. However, due to the Olympic Games, it does not seem like I can get a visa for any duration of stay in China at this point. I find this quite odd because I would have thought the Chinese government would have made it easier for people to get into their country rather than more difficult. Alas, last April China implemented policy changes to the issuance of visas making it much more difficult for everyone to enter into China for any reason.

I have had the thought that I could come home after Germany and then leave for China once the visa restrictions are lifted in October after the Games are over. I would love to see everyone as I have been looking forward to it since I left in February. I do now know what will happen though. I can stay in mainland Europe for 90 days without a visa which could carry me all the way into the first week of November. There is also no assurance that the Chinese government will in fact lift the visa policy changes that were made in April after the Games have concluded.