My Love & My Job...

I try not to think too much about the consequences of my lifestyle on the people I care about. Travel has been a central part of my life for as long as I can remember, a singular constant that has defined me in countless ways. It's who I am, on multiple levels - an amalgamation of cultures and ideas, curated and mixed together into a strange, exotic, murky cocktail that smells vaguely tropical... I'm OK with that. However, on the rare occasion when I stop to really think about how my incessant wandering has impacted the people close to me, I start wondering if all my relationships wouldn’t be stronger and more stable if I was actually physically present in the lives of my friends and family. I’m not, really. I’m a phantom presence in a lot of people’s lives…not actually there, but just a looming presence on their facebook feed, a source of the occasional disembodied e-mail, maybe a phone call once every few months. That’s my life, it seems, and those are my connections. I can look at travel from a lot of different ways, but dwelling on its negative role on my relationships seems rather fruitless…
Every now and then, though, I can’t help but think that I’m doing something really wrong. At the moment, I’m sitting in Bangkok’s airport en route to London for a week, and I can’t shake the feeling that leaving my wife behind in Chiang Mai is stupid, selfish, and somehow symptomatic of some deeper problem in my life. We move halfway across the world and a month later I just leave her to go to a conference… That doesn’t seem right… The thing is, my life is pretty awesome, so I can’t quite pinpoint any "deeper problem." Maybe I just miss her, and feel guilty about leaving, even though it’s only been a few hours…
Yeah, I think that's it. But this is my life, and my wonderful wife has long since gotten used to my quarterly trips around the world, it's par for the course for our relationship. She’s even managed to join me on two work trips, to Mumbai and Hong Kong, and I know she valued the experience. As our relationship unfolded while we were dating, these trips framed our time together, and they came up like clockwork, every three months. I don't think a lot of other marriages and relationships could endure these kind of week-long absences, though, and I say that simply because I've watched work schedules like this disrupt all kinds of relationships. Advertising hours are famous for being disruptive to the health of marriages... But some relationships can work with them, or around them, and there really are no rules or formulas for how solid relationships ought to work. It all depends on the people involved. If you can maintain a powerful link with your loved one while still traveling separately, that's a powerful testament to your connection, I think. We've managed to make it work, Becky and I. It's just going to take some getting used to while we live in Thailand....
Self-doubt has to be one of the worst feelings in the world. Trying to convince yourself of the inherent righteousness of what you’re doing when you don’t really believe it is a waste of time. Yet here I am, doing just that, whiling away the hours till my flight departs by engaging in what Becky sometimes calls “self-beat.” We tell our yoga students about it all the time: “don’t let the inner voice and inner critic shape your experience.” Learning to tune out the endless mental chatter is one of the primary goals of yoga, and I need to remind myself of that every day. Particularly at moments like this, when I’m about to fly halfway across the world, leaving my wife behind, just because it is a part of my job, and I've grown used to this routine. I think I need to take my own advice and listen to what I tell my yoga students: just do it, turn off the thought-process, quit editorializing, and go ahead and work through the process, and everything will be fine. The reason we do yoga is not just to be fit and have nice buns and to surround ourselves with positive people prone to new age-esque pronouncements of “mercury in retrograde” and vague statements about channeling "good energy." We do yoga to have control over our thoughts. At least, that’s why I do it. Without yoga, I used to dwell in darkness, ruminating on the worst aspects of humanity, looking out at the world and seeing squalor and the evil, greedy machinations of a species seemingly bent on its own destruction. With yoga, all those things may still be present, but I can find an inner calm, a repose within it all, a sense of pervasive serenity that lets me move through my life with something resembling grace instead of constant resentment towards humanity about the state of the world. And that’s what I need right now... the inner yoga to quiet my thoughts...
Yes, I’m leaving my wife behind for a week while I traipse halfway across the world to London. But she’ll be fine. She’s working at a great school, has phenomenal, loving students, a community of people looking out for her, a wonderful home, a devoted puppy, and nice, concerned neighbors. She’ll be fine. I guess I just feel a little guilty for leaving. But such is life, such is the job I have, and my wife of all people knows it better than most. We’ll spend a hard week apart, in our respective worlds, and then next Sunday I’ll find myself in her arms and everything will be right again with the world. Travel, after all, is somehow part of our dharma. Separate and together, we are with each other because we share a commitment to see as much of the planet as we can during our brief stay in this world. It's a privilege to get around, and I'm so blessed to share my journey with Becky. I couldn't ask for a more loving partner and a better, more enduring love to color my world... But I do worry about her. Those of you reading, do me a favor and send my wife some love this week. A facebook message, a phone call, a skype session... all these things help us feel connected, and I'd appreciate you reaching out to remind my wife that we're a part of a much larger community, no matter what the distance between us... It'll help the week pass much faster...
Thanks, y'all. Catch you on the flip side from the UK.