What did it all mean? Reaching the destination didn’t magically endow my pursuit with a concrete meaning. I expected as much, but it was still disheartening to face that inevitable fact. The more I pondered why it all had to happen, the less satisfying became all the previous explanations that at the time sounded convincing. My pursuit wasn’t entirely about not conforming to the realities of life. The thought that every step of mine was taken with the sole purpose of not becoming ordinary seemed rather limited and even conceited. It felt unnatural to reduce those steps to a mere act of rebellion–there was more to them than merely fighting back. That an inconsequential pursuit assumed a deeper meaning through an awareness of lack of meaning, in spite of carrying a more poetic tone, was too terrifying a conclusion to accept. Something was amiss in my understanding of why I had come all the way here. I didn’t know where to begin looking for the explanation.
When I took off from the hostel a bit early, the wet streets smelled of rain, and the sky was just as gray as the day before. To start off the day, I had breakfast at a cafe rather than sticking with the usual diet of bread and water. This sudden change in routine wasn’t entirely for celebration–rather, it was because the relocation offer was covering some of the expenses for the day. It meant that I could even take a cab to the airport later. The small taste of luxury left me feeling rather spoiled. Being able to take a cab straight to the airport meant that I didn’t have to leave the town so early. I figured I’d go to the western part of the city and slowly walk back to downtown, where I would have lunch and leave for the airport. Against the flow of the river, I walked and walked toward the west. Downtown was eerily quiet and almost looked like a different place, without all the festivities and commotion of the previous night. Sometimes it would start showering, and the rain would let up just when I was about to give up on walking and take shelter at tram stops. The rain and I continued to play this game of tag for some time.
Now that I had finally arrived at the destination, there was no more time pressure or overwhelming odds to overcome. But the absence of the usual obstacles didn’t make me feel bored this time. Instead, I was once again beginning to feel uncertain. The road didn’t actually end in Dublin. It led to new roads that seemed even more daunting to navigate. Ahead of me were the new life in Seattle and the new position that I was about to start. The stakes were high, having left behind the comfortable and predictable lifestyle back in Sydney. I had already made a somewhat irrational career move by taking so much time off from the position that I hadn’t even started, in order to live up to my silly daydreams. All these uncertainties filled me with nervous thoughts. Yet in that moment of being unsure, I was thinking rather than drowning in ennui. My thoughts were alive and still chasing clarity. Maybe there were no thoughts without uncertainty, and to live was to be unsure. The elusive question about what it all meant began to feel less cruel.
I had given up playing tag with the weather and simply walked the streets as light rain drizzled down. I allowed my thoughts to drift and reflected on what I had observed about the world and myself on the road. There were three things that I had been turning over in my head. Firstly, there were people outside my bubble, and they were just people. The scary-looking man on a provincial train in Bulgaria was just a regular dude trying to get back to his village. The bride and groom at a Uyghur wedding were just people living their lives thousands of miles away from mine. Beyond the familiar routines of what I called life back home were the Romanian dude trying to explain to me how to make a brandy from fruits, the Korean-speaking Uzbek ajummas, the sour Georgian taxi driver who didn’t want to haggle, the fellow travelers mounting struggles to reach their own destinations, and the grandpa rocking the two-stringed guitar on a night train to Bukhara. They were all just people with their own stories and aspirations beyond what my everyday grind back home had allowed me to see.
Secondly, the world was far smaller and bigger than what I was made to imagine. In my daydreams, the world viewed on a map looked intimidating and the distances between places unconquerable. However, they only appeared that way because I was looking at an abstract representation from within the confines of my bubble. Distance between places was actually nothing more than dirt, air, rivers, oceans, railways and roads, which were all crossable even with my feeble steps and meager timeframe. Only by lugging my backpack all the way here from Beijing did I realize that the world wasn’t as big as my imagination had led me to believe. Still, in many ways, the world was bigger than I thought. Everything kept slowly yet rapidly changing as I traveled westward in ways that I didn’t anticipate. My view of the world, having been shaped by limited means, was fragmented and incomplete at best. I tried my hardest to listen to the stories left untold. But I doubt there would ever be enough time to really understand them all.
Lastly, there was a question that I had been posing to myself time and again: “People were kind to me. Can I be just as kind to others?” Total strangers were happy to offer help and rescued me from troubles without looking for anything in return. Their unconditional favor was confusing because I wasn’t sure I could do the same for them. I wished to lead a life worthy of their helping hands. I wanted to live up to that box of cookies the Bulgarian passenger left me on the train to Gorna. I hoped I could someday look out for someone else the same way that a number of strangers helped me find a safe passage across the Irkeshtam Pass and beyond.
By around noon, I had only managed to check out some museums and the giant line in front of the Guinness brewery. It was almost time to say goodbye to Dublin. The departure wasn’t bittersweet or emotional. All I could think of was the fact that I was just tired and ready to go to Seattle. After lunch, I jumped in a cab and headed to the airport. Noticing my destination, the driver casually asked, “Where are you flying to?” “I’m flying to Seattle,” I replied. The driver was a friendly Irish gentleman, and we ended up talking for the entire ride. But the conversation never landed on why I was going to Seattle or how I had reached Dublin. The driver, just like anyone else, didn’t really know or care about my daydreams and the imaginary roads that I had followed. The indifference kind of amplified the loneliness that I began sensing since arriving in Dublin. Although I had long accepted the fact that no one could tell me what my pursuit meant, I still sort of wished that someone would at least know about it.
As we neared the airport, the bilingual highway signs started showing the diagrams of airplanes and the directions to the terminals. “We are almost there,” the driver reminded me in a friendly voice. Sensing that the trip was really coming to an end, I just felt like telling some other soul about what I had gone through. So I just blurted out, “I came to Dublin starting from Beijing.” The driver simply said, “Oh yeah?” At this slight sign of interest, I started boasting, “Yeah, I crossed China, Central Asia, and Europe to finally be here.” Excited to have finally shared the story with someone else, I looked toward the driver’s seat for some sort of acknowledgement that I hoped would lighten the growing melancholy. But the driver didn’t make much of what I said. He just laughed and remarked, “Your passport must have stamps everywhere!” No one was interested in why my trip had to happen or how I felt about it. But I suddenly understood that the indifference of my surroundings wasn’t a reason for despair. Things were insignificant by default. The road was just a road, and people were just people. What sparked any likeness of meaning in them was the way I chose to approach the road, and the way I interacted with the people along the way.
So, again, what did it all mean? My steps, insofar as they were meaningless, finally found their meaning in how I had chosen to take them. Nothing was inevitable and everything happened by choice. In spite of all the obstacles and problems that appeared to be random at best, whether I would reach the destination had always been under my total control. All I needed was a choice of taking the next step. And how I chose to take that inconsequential step gave it all the significance. It was how I chose that allowed me to realize that there were people outside my bubble and that they were just people. It was how I chose that made me see that the world was far bigger and smaller than I was made to believe. It was how I chose that helped me see that people were kind and made me wonder whether I could be just as kind to them. By the time there was a boarding call for the flight to Seattle, the thick clouds had cleared up from the sky and the horizon was brightly burning with the golden color of the evening sun. I was unsure, but that was fine, for there was no life without a bit of uncertainty, no meaning without a bit of control, and no story without a bit of daydream. The plane soared through the burning clouds.
The End