FOOTNOTES DIFFERENCES

Would it be possible to sightsee or holiday continually and enthusiastically for a year? This rhetorical question is of course meant to be answered by a negative.

I look around at other campers on the site and assume that they are mostly on shorter trips. As far as I can judge they sightsee and they relax. We do the same to a degree but I think as we plan a year travelling that we are adopting a change of lifestyle too. I suppose we could just ‘fall’ into a new lifestyle. The trouble is as John will probably agree, that though I often trip up and stumble, I scrabble around too much to fall easily into anything.

If, one has worked one’s butt off all one’s life as John has, then a year’s holiday appears perfectly reasonable at retirement. Not that this is John’s position. As we have said to each other, the problem is the next year, the one after, the one that follows, when one has to make sense of a life without work and earnings as one’s main purpose.

As an artist and as a woman I have throughout my life had to contemplate the problem of creating meaning and self-justification from unpaid self-directed and undervalued work. So my biggest frustration with our trip so far has come from not being able to apply myself in my own peculiar way to my idiosyncratic work methods. My art is constructed from the daily flesh and meat of my life but digesting and regurgitating it as artists do requires a pattern of both movement and stillness which John and I are attempting to form. John also wants to work on this trip.