The Seeking Balance Tour

I am on the second day of a journey by which I will close out this year by traveling around the world while making presentations at academic conferences in Australia and India. It is an exciting yet bittersweet journey. Exciting because it is the fulfillment of a dream and a desire to see the world; bittersweet because I am traveling alone. I have decided to give my journey a name and to write about it here because in many ways the journey is an explicit exercise for me in sense-making and my life. I am calling this journey “The Seeking Balance Tour of 2010”.

This past year has been tumultuous for me. My marriage of nearly 29 years came to an end, which felt a lot like the childhood experience of being on the high end of a teeter-totter when the person on the other end suddenly gets off and you have that terrifying feeling of helplessly falling without any control of the speed of the fall। And while at the time it seemed like a sudden experience, I know now that it was not. I know that things had been out of balance for quite some time and that we simply reached the tipping point, the breaking point, beyond which all hope of recovering balance, was lost.

Last July, in the middle of this very negative legal proceeding, it occurred to me that I would be spending the holiday season on my own and I began to wonder what I could do to avoid feeling lonely and depressed. It then occurred to me that I could do anything that I wanted. I have always enjoyed traveling and long dreamed of traveling the world so I began to look for international academic conferences on topics that fit within my area of research at which I might present. I found two conferences the timing of which bookend Christmas, submitted proposals that were accepted, submitted the travel request to my university, which was also accepted, made the travel plans and here I am.

That was the first step in a spiritual journey, a journey of the Big Picture, and the destination is self-discovery. As a child, I usually thought of the teeter-totter as a rather boring activity. I preferred the greater challenge of standing on top of the middle of the teeter-totter by myself and shifting my weight from one foot to the other until the board reached a balance parallel to the ground. That is what I am trying to do in my life. To acknowledge, accept, deal with, and leave behind those attributes of my life that led to the crash; and to discover, recognize, embrace, and appreciate those attributes, activities, attitudes, and persons that I need in order for my life to regain balance. That is my quest and I invite you to follow along as I chronicle the daily journey, discoveries, and insights that I have along the way.