This marks the two hundredth post on WhereTheRoadGoes. It’s been a long journey over the last two and a bit years. Sometimes it really is often only on looking back that it becomes clear how truly far we have come.
I’d never given the smallest thought to the idea that a sequence of events that would change so much in my life was about to begin.
Sometime around 2007, this blog was born. I was traveling to Thailand with some friends in search of adventure and mischief and a blog was going to be a simple tool for recording some of what we managed to get up to overseas. I’d never considered writing properly. I’d never given the smallest thought to the idea that a sequence of events that would change so much in my life was about to begin. So I went, explored, found mischief. Returned. Became nostalgic.
Traveling, I was starting to realise, is something that gets under your skin. The more you see of other ways of living, the more you begin to question in your own life. You look at things differently. Perhaps you become a little more principled. Perhaps you realise that there are things bigger than you out there in the world. Things that are wrong. That must be fought. Like the proverbial Pandora’s Box, these are thoughts that you learn cannot be undone. Things realised cannot be unrealised. Increasingly, thoughts came home to roost out of the cold air of the vaguely possible, demanding to be seen as the things that could be if I only did.
Thoughts on how we change for all we have seen. The people, met in fleeting moments, who stay with us so much longer. People no longer around, whose thoughts have since passed on to others. A small, but no less indestructible immortality. All coming home to be confronted, fashioned into a life that means something. Coming home to demand of me a resolution, a way of doing as I felt. So I began to write. And I haven’t stopped since. A growing storm of words that I grew to love. It’s now two hundred posts later and I couldn’t be happier to stand out here if I tried.
So thank you all for coming with. To the deserts and the beaches, the happy pizza bars and the hospitals, sitting on the trucks and sleeping on the trains. For coming with me into my head and a thousand crazier places that I discovered existed outside of it.
Let’s see where the next two hundred leads.