2023-01-14/15 — The Longest Day

Well folks, I’m home.

It’s crazy, but my trip to New Zealand already feels like a dream… It’s only been a day since I left, but it’s almost like I never went.

It’s really funny how life and memories work.

Here we are again, back in regular life, with all the decisions that I needed to make before I left on my trip still out there to be made.

I did come back having learned some important lessons, though:

While out on my trip, I ran into many fellow travelers. I think it was that experience that began to drive in the point that others have suggested many times over the years. If you’re looking for a special someone, and you want to find someone who wants to spend their life lifting the world, then you need to go out there and spend your life in those circles.

Of course.

I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes.

If I wanted to find someone who wanted to travel, then I would go travel. I just did that, and I proved that true. Many wonderful people enjoying traveling around the world. Certainly, there are people I could find who are traveling who are also the kinds of people who want to dedicate their entire lives to doing everything they can to make the world a better place. But searching among the travelers, I’d still be sifting through to try and find those travelers who are dedicated to that vision and just happen to be taking some time for themselves to travel and enjoy this beautiful planet of ours.

But… why not just go right to the source? Why not just go straight to the places where those kinds of people spend their time? Why not go volunteer? Join with service and community groups until I can get my own stuff off the ground? I’m much more likely to find a special someone who’s greatest hope in this world is to spend their life lifting the world by going and spending my time with the people who do those things day in and day out already.

So that’s what I’m going to do. 🙂

There’s a part of me that still winces at the idea. I still haven’t given up all hope in what I trusted in for so many years, but the truth is that I will never have any control over that, and I know that there’s nothing I can do to change what happened in the past nor what will happen in the future. Those in control already made their choices, and hard as it might be, I’m not what was chosen.

The end.

Logically, at least.

In reality, I wish I could fully let go. Like the prayer Jennifer Aniston’s character offers towards the end of the movie Bruce Almighty as her heart is breaking…

But it doesn’t seem to be in my nature, so a part of me holds on, and the heart just waits and hurts all the time…

Pretty… dumb, eh?

It’s funny, I’ve spent a lot of time on Tinder… From the profiles I’ve “liked,” you’d think I were just interested in any attractive woman out there, from the ones looking for friends with benefits or an extra partner in their pyamorous lifestyle, to the kinds of women I’m actually interested in. If the former “match” with me, that’s when reality kicks in: That’s not what I want, so I unmatch. I just want my person. That one I can be one with, and we can give our lives to help the world together, arm in arm, hand in hand.

So… volunteering. Going out and serving with groups who go out and serve. That’s what’s coming shortly.

That’s where I want to be anyway, and maybe, just maybe, that’s where I’ll find someone i can be one with and finally live my dream of changing the world side by side with my person.

So… I learned/had that reinforced. 🙃

What else… Oh yeah, I feel like I have a better grasp on the importance of choosing which battles I fight. I have neither the time, nor the bandwidth nor the capacity or whatever other words would be best to explain that I am simply incapable of fighting and winning all the battles that I see on the fields before me. I have to pick and choose, or I’m going to spend the rest of my life stressed out, angry, and unhappy.

So as much as I wish I could just conquer all of my weaknesses all at once. As much as I wish I could be a different person than I am in some ways, I just need to accept that I can’t fight and win all the battles that I have before me. So I’m going to pick and choose.

And the others? Such as my continual beating up of myself for only being attracted to a small segment of the female population–beating myself up for being so superficial, so shallow… I’ve beat myself up for a long time, and I haven’t made any progress and widening the spectrum of women to whom I’m attracted. So… I’m giving up on that battle. I’ve never won it. I’ve never even come close. In fact, the more time goes by, the worst it seems to get. There’s no sense fighting a losing battle. I just need to accept what I am, whether it’s my fault or simply natural, and I need to put my energy into battles that I can actually win.

I also had resurrected within Me the philosophy of both and. I don’t remember exactly where I got that from, if I made it up myself, or if I borrowed it from somebody. I think maybe I got it from an old friend who, when I was a teenager, reached out to me to help me in a time of great inner struggle.

Anyway, the philosophy of both and says that it doesn’t have to be either or. It can be both and. In fact, let’s just go for it! Both and.

When my sister and brother-in-law were trying to figure out where they wanted to live, traveling around the country looking for different possible places, one of the things that I said to my sister was go to the place that makes your heart sing.

While on my trip, I’ve been thinking about that a little bit–for all areas of my life. What will make my heart sing? What will make my heart sing as far as where I live is concerned? What will make my heart sing when it comes to how I spend my days? What will make my heart sing when it comes to the person I search for as my special someone?

What will make my heart sing?

I’ve got a lot of stuff going on in this little brain of mine. 🙃

So I woke up to my alarm about 3:00 in the morning and the Christ Church New Zealand airport after maybe an hour or two of sleep. As my blurry eyes began to make out my surroundings, I realized that the gate leading to the international terminal had been opened, so I groggly gathered up my things, put my shoes on, and carried my heavy packs over to the escalator, up the escalator, and to the Qantas counter.

Gratefully, there were no further issues, at least as far as tickets are concerned. They printed my boarding passes, and I went over to wait at the security entrance, as that was still closed. So I parked my butt first in line to wait for another 45 minutes before the TSA equivalent over there was open and processing passengers.

Once through security, I charge my phone at the gate, ate some of the food that I had bought at the grocery store, and just waited.

Gratefully, my flight was on time, so we left New Zealand about 6:00 in the morning, arriving in Melbourne Australia a few hours later. A few hours after that, my plane took off from Melbourne, and perhaps a dozen hours later or so, landed in Los Angeles at LAX.

It was funny. I left ChristChurch New Zealand at 6:00 a.m. the morning of the 15th of January, and I arrived in Los Angeles something like 20 hours later… at 6:00 a.m. on the 15th of January. 🙃

You know how sometimes you wish for more time in a day? Well, i just had the longest day of my life–a 43-hour 15th of January–something like that, at least. 😁

The flight from Christchurch to Melbourne went just fine. I think I watched a movie on the way. The flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles was long. Oh my goodness was it long! I don’t remember if my flight from New York to Shanghai was longer or not… I can’t remember if we had a layover anywhere. I do remember that that was an extremely long flight as well, so I don’t know what my longest flight that I’ve ever been on was, but this one was very long.

Gratefully, and forgive the graphic nature or whatever if this is too much information, but if there is one thing that Qantas actually did well, it’s that they chose cloth seats for their airplanes and not the faux leather seats. I can’t stand leather seats. Leather seats, leather couches, whatever. They’re cold. They’re hot. They’re uncomfortable. And they don’t absorb farts at all. The last one being the most important of them all. 🙃 All sitting furniture should be able to observe farts. It’s only kind to the people around you to give them a place to send their excess gas without having to hold it in or bother anyone else with the smell or excuse themselves to go to the bathroom or find some place to be clear from everyone else and let it out without concern.

So thanks, qantas. You may have had the worst customer service of any business that I’ve dealt with anywhere in the entire world. You may have taken many many hours of my vacation from me with all the grief you caused. You may have cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars because of your lying and poorly trained representatives, you may have lost my luggage (I’ll get to that), but at least you gave me cloth seats that I could fart into on a 14? hour flight. So… thx.

The long flight from Melbourne Australia to LAX was… Ok otherwise. My headphones decided to short out, at least one side, on that flight for whatever reason, and once again I was near some crying babies. So even though I had only gotten an hour or two of sleep the night before, I was only really able to sleep just a little bit on the 28ish-hour trip back. I watched a few movies, I think, but my eyes were glazed over and so tired that I napped as much as I could before going back to one of the movies.

Oh, lost luggage. Yeah, so when I got to LAX, I remembered that the Qantas representative in Christchurch had told me that I might need to get my luggage at LAX and recheck it with the new airline to Arkansas, as my tickets were purchased with Qantas as the main airline, but with one of the legs being flown by American Airlines.

But when I went to go get my luggage, there was no luggage to be had. My big pack didn’t show up on the baggage dealy. I waited for probably 45 minutes? But nothing ever came, and when the Qantas employee said might need to recheck it, there was an element of doubt. So I gave up, went back through security, went to my gate, and asked the people at my gate about my luggage. They let me know that it was definitely possible that I might have needed to pick up my luggage at the baggage claim and then recheck it, and that I should have mentioned it to the people at baggage claim that my bag was missing, but they also said that since my bag was tagged all the way to arkansas, it was most likely that they would have picked the bag up and send it over onto the plane it was supposed to go to.

Well, after a flight on American Airlines from LAX to XNA, one that included faux leather seats (ugh), I arrived in Arkansas to find once again, my luggage was not in baggage claim.

So I went to the American Airlines counter, filled out my lost luggage report, and gratefully received a ride home from the airport from my nephew.

I got home to my house probably about 4:00 p.m., the sun already far down in the sky. I went from Summer to winter, and from sunsets at 9:30 to sunsets around 4:30, or whatever it was…

Once home, I unloaded what stuff I had in my carry-on. I started going through 2 months worth of mail. I had a long conversation with my nephew Thomas, and my other nephew who got married while I was gone showed me pictures and videos from his wedding. 😊

Though I was completely exhausted, somehow I didn’t get my little butt in bed until something like 3:30 in the morning, having gotten only a handful of our sleep over the last couple of days combined after a couple of months of sleep deprivation as the general rule. 🙃

But whatever. I’m home, and life is about to change a whole lot. But I’m 41, so I’m well within my rights to have my ongoing midlife crisis. It’s funny to think that I’m a middle-aged man now. 🙃😆

So weird.

Loves and hugs, my lovelies. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen