A journey starts with the decision to go on a journey. This decision will most likely be based on more or less rational reasons, and I think it is important to understand these reasons. By knowing why you are going, what you hope to experience, what you want to learn, what you want to “achieve”, you will be better able to identify where you want to go, how to travel, what to do, and who to surround yourself with.

My decision to go on an independent three-year round-the-world trip was remarkably easy to make, though the reasons may be complicated. Although I had been vaguely thinking about such a possibility for quite some time, it came to me like a bolt of lightning in August 2005. Exactly what happened in that moment of clarity (or delusion?) is difficult to ascertain, but I immediately put my trust in this decision. Everything changed. In my mind, I have been travelling ever since that moment.

 

May 06 was chosen as the right time to go - to wait for the European summer, and to give myself enough time to plan and save up. The first thing I knew I had to do was to release an album of piano pieces I had been working on for almost a decade, on and off, yet mysteriously never managed to complete. Amazingly, it was released four months later, in early December… Another big milestone will be when this website goes live. At the time of writing, everything is slowly falling into place.

 

Back to my “complex reasons”... On the next few pages I will sum up my thoughts on life after 28 years of living, and propose A Free Will Manifesto for the next three. Like most of this website, I am publishing these thoughts for my own benefit as well as others’ - if I ever feel lost on the road (though “feeling lost” may not always be such a bad thing!), I may refer back to these pages to remind myself of why I am doing what I am doing, or perhaps to discard these reasons completely, and to find entirely new ones.