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We Are Making Choices Everyday and Sometimes It’s So Visible That It Makes You Laugh

Hello from Canberra, Australia.

It’s been more than 2 years since I left Australia last time. I look forward to seeing old friends as well as making new friends.

I’ll be here till 23 March. My plan is to get to Thailand via Malaysia. I’ve decided this much, but not further than that.

All I want to do is, in short, to be on the road. So, in that sense, I have no goal in mind. But, if you think about it, we are all on the road. Some people keep moving constantly. Some people stay at the same place. I want to be on the road with the spirit of goer.

To stay or to go. If this was a question about traveling in time, I’d have the same answer: I’d keep going in time. This is a metaphorical question, so my answer is metaphorical too, but I don’t want to stay at the same temporal location or to desire to go back to the past. In a metaphorical sense, going back to the past is like being occupied only with old memories.

But let’s talk about the past for now. More than 10 years ago, when a favorite teacher of mine at high school asked me what I’m going to do after studying in Australia, I told him I want to travel around the world and be able to work from anywhere through the internet. This was all before I got to know about Chris Guillebeau and other folks who do that kind of things. My 18 year old self knew it would be possible to do this in a few years time and now there are people living this lifestyle.

I forgot all about this dream until recently. Even when I learned about the concepts like location independence, it didn’t come back to me.

I could have gone to live on the road 2 years ago, but I didn’t. I think I wasn’t aware that I could do it. I bet there are things you want to do right now and perhaps you are not aware that you could do them somehow. Does that sound likely?

I’m happy with what I did and people I met during the last 2 years. I made some great friends and memories, and I wouldn’t have met them if I hadn’t done what I did. So, I’m not going to say I should have gone, but it’s great, because it makes me aware that possibilities are in front of me to grab.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. You do what you do and you don’t know what happens until you actually do it.

By the way, here’s what did happen to me.

I left Japan on 7 Feb. I got to Gold Coast Airport early in the morning on 8 Feb. I was to fly to Sydney from Gold Coast, so I went to Jetstar’s check-in counter to get a boarding pass. The guy at the counter told me I could catch an earlier flight, because I was there… early. I thought about it for a second, and declined his offer. I already had a plenty of time in Sydney to catch a bus from Sydney to Canberra; I didn’t need an extra hour to kill at Sydney Airport. I chose to have a rest at Gold Coast Airport.

At that time, I didn’t realize there was a time difference between Gold Coast (or rather, the state of Queensland, I suppose) and Sydney. So, when I showed up at the boarding gate for what I thought to be my flight, an officer from Jetstar told me I was there too early. I thought it was 10:45am, but it was 9:45am. So, I ended up getting one extra hour, which I didn’t think existed.

With my planned flight, however, there was a problem with the airplane. So, the passengers on that flight had to get off the plane and had to arrange a new flight. Flight, cancelled.

I was supposed to get to Sydney around 2pm with my original flight. By choosing to catch this flight rather than the earlier flight the guy at the counter suggested to me, I ended up getting to Sydney around 3pm. My bus was to leave from International Terminal at 3:15pm, and it takes about 15 minutes to transfer from Domestic Terminal, where I landed, to International Terminal. You know what happened. I missed the bus.

It wasn’t a matter of life and death, but it’s interesting to realize that there was clearly a decisive moment that changed my life to some extent. I mean, all of us do face one decisive question everyday: Should I choose x or not? In this case of mine, it was pretty clear upon reflection. Again, I don’t know what would have happened if I had chosen to get the earlier flight. I wouldn’t have written this post this way for sure. But the rest, I don’t know.

I wrote the “you don’t know what happens until you do it” part of this post before this aircraft exodus story. It’s funny how things happen like that.

Things don’t go as planned sometimes. It was a good reminder and I’m thankful it didn’t cost my life or anything.