Now that I was in Europe, I was ready to travel a bit slower and start thinking forward to my eventual return back to the US. On my first day back in Bucharest, I drew up an approximate budget for what kind of salary I would need to satisfy all my wants and needs if I were to continue living in Seattle. This would give me an idea as to what kind of jobs I should be looking for to complement my preferred lifestyle. I had also decided that I wanted to begin a daily routine in order to consistently improve skills that I felt would continue to play an important role in my life.
Most important to me was to have a fulfilling career, since I felt like that's where most of my waking time would be spent for at least the next five or so years. To me, a fulfilling career means being able to work on something that I care about (feels like it fits into a larger picture), I can contribute to meaningfully, and allows me to think about interesting things. In practice, this meant I wanted to allot roughly one hour a day to studying, thinking about, or working on problems in the machine learning / data science sphere. At that point in my thought process, that was as specific I could be.
Secondly, music was something that I felt would continue to enrich my life more than most things. Lacking a piano for now, and not interested in toying with the kalimba I continue to carry around (but otherwise ignore), I decided to spend 30 minutes a day doing ear training exercises to help improve my "musical ear". Teoria is a terrific online resource for something like this.
The third and final "skill" that I wanted to focus on is more vaguely formulated than the prior two. At first, I labeled it "travel", but after some thought decided it was broader than just moving from place to place. The most fitting, hand wavey way in which I can describe it would be a "holistic perspective on life's experiences". This could also mean a continual cultivation of my own personal worldview and philosophy. To me, this means experiencing new things and ways of living, and from those experiences achieving a better sense of why others behave the way they do, why I behave the way I do, and how it all fits together. Throughout my travels I've been perpetually amazed at the diversity of cultures and perspectives that I come across. I've also been impressed by just how utterly massive and expansive the earth's surface is (I'm typing this part way through a 9-hour train ride from Bucharest to Timisoara, another town within Romania, a country that is otherwise a small blip on the world map). Back home, it's easy to feel like you are living, if not in the center, at the least in a very integral component of the universe as humanity knows it. But people feel like this wherever they live, to varying but rather limited extents of truthfulness. It seems that even the going-ons in the world's largest and most influential cities have a negligible effect on daily life for most people, except on the time-scale of years to decades.
But despite how isolated communities may seem by distance and culture, somehow we have a global economy that ties everything together -- where a housing market crash in the USA can catalyze the fall of financial collectives in other, seemingly unrelated parts of the world. And, though it's a worn cliche, people share common values wherever you go, too. We all value friendship, comfort, comedy, safety, health, freedom of expression. It seems to me that, despite our long history of cultural isolationism, if we can more or less independently conclude that these traits are valuable, then that says something important (and dare I say, "objective") about humanity and the human experience. This interests me, and I think one of the most effective ways to really experience this collective sense is to go to these culturally isolated places, interact with the people, to live, if only momentarily, in shoes that kind of look like the ones they are wearing.
So, in a sense, I've been continually working on this third objective for the past few months -- simply by ordering food I've never tasted in restaurants I've never been to, decrypting public transportation in new cities, making friends from different parts of the world in hostels. But there's been something else on my mind for the past few months: that is, the ubiquity of countries where speaking more than one language is the norm, rather than the exception -- as it is in the US. Typically, this means a native language and English, but other times people will be able to speak all the languages in geographic proximity to their home country. A few people even spend the time to learn the language of cultures that interest them and/or value the same types of things they do, so that they can go there to visit, work, or live for some time. Thus, because I've been feeling that my next extended travel destination will be in a place where this language is widely spoken, and it is one of the most popular second languages to learn in the world, I've decided to relearn Spanish!
I had originally taken three, sequential Spanish courses in high school, but in the context of being a 16-year-old teen in a white-washed town, the experience took the perennial question "When will I ever use this in real life?" to its logical extremes. But now that I have a reasonable belief that within a year or two I will be spending at least a few weeks in Central or South America, I've been motivated to learn. I set the goal to spend 30 minutes a day working on my Spanish, using Duolingo and other resources. But in the past few days, the initial giddiness of learning something completely new has propelled me to spend at least an hour each day trying out different mediums (like the Ext@ en Espanol videos and the HelloTalk app) to renew my speaking, listening, and writing skills.
Of course, sitting deep in thought with my head nested in my hand hasn't occupied all of my time during these days, but since this post is already quite long I will describe my day-to-day activities during this time in the next post.
To be continued...
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