Thank you for these five days to explore Saigon – a city about which I knew almost nothing before arriving.Thank you that it’s possible to travel so far from home and yet find a home here. Thank you – or as you taught me to say, cảm ơn.
One thing I can’t ever seem to stop doing is learning. Travel is pretty cool that way – it keeps you on your toes, teaches you lessons big and small, and ensures you never get too comfortable in what you think you know.
It’s as we’re all circling up in the ICU waiting room that my answer comes: Even when I’m not a traveler, I am still a daughter, a sister, a niece, a cousin, and – this one being especially true today – a granddaughter.
I’m not much of a “returner” when it comes to travel, but I felt a strange sense of unfinished business with India. I missed the chaos, the chai, the challenge – and I knew what I had to do. I had to go back.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time longer than a single post, you will have no doubt noticed I’m slightly obsessed with quotes. Travel quotes, life quotes, anything I can tuck away for inspiration on a rainy day – I’m not picky.
Writing a book proposal requires a different part of your brain – not the fun part that concerns itself with creating prose as pretty as poetry. Rather, it’s all about wrangling the many parts of your book into a whole.
And usually it’s right then – as my face is turned to the sun and my arms and legs are moving in great big circles through the Arabian Sea – that it hits me, every day: This is my life.
Pigeons aren’t supposed to be beautiful, I tell myself. And yet I see it everywhere I look – in the outline of their wings, in their iridescent neck feathers, in the wind brushing my face which isn’t wind at all but the result of a hundred birds moving the air at the same time.
![Live boldly: On [not] doing that thing you most want to do.](https://www.candaceroserardon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/IMG_2775.jpg "Live boldly: On [not] doing that thing you most want to do.")
Two weeks ago I found myself strapped to my desk, horrified that I’d waited until the last minute for something so important. Everything, it seemed, kept getting in my way – and yet the biggest thing determined to stop me was myself.
I came to Sacramento to revel in silence; to be in a place where I know no one and no one knows me. I came to process, to think or not think, whatever my mood; to speak or not speak. I came for that thing called solitude.