Combining two worlds

Whenever I am in Dublin on a Sunday evening I go to that place. That favourite bar of mine, where a bunch of musicians play away Irish songs to the crowd's but above all to their very own pleasure and joy. And every time I find myself there, sipping from my Guiness and listening to songs about the world and about Ireland, the rootless traveler in me stirs and awakens. The urge and desire to pick up the backpack and to venture off, to drift from job to job in third world countries, to teach English for six months someplace only to earn my daily meal for the next 5 months by picking olives, to work in a pub at some tropical beach during the tourist season and to earn a meagre living by scribbling translations from an attic in Paris... the appeal of that very life-style -although always inside me but usually fairly dormant- is at its very strongest those Sunday evenings.

And then there's the other side, the yearning for intellectual saturation and a need to contribute meaningfully to the world, to have a career and an income and a professional challenge and the means to support a family later and to raise children, there's all that, that I really want as well and which I cannot leave out of my life.

So there's the challenge, strike the right balance there. And although I would say that these days I do reasonably well in combining the two, those melodramatic tunes on Sunday suggest that there's much more to life than what I am currently experiencing.

It's time to pick up the backpack again, even if it is just for a brief break-away.