52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 31: My Goals After This Year

In Which I Talk A Little About The Things I Think I Want To Be Different About Myself When I Return To “Normal” Life

“How has this year changed you?”

It’s a question I get asked a lot when people learn about my trip, but it’s still a hard one to answer.

Most of that, I suspect, is due to still being in it: there are things I’m doing and feelings I’m feeling that might be permanent, but they also might be functions of a highly abnormal year. When I return to living in Vancouver and it’s been eight degrees and rainy for two straight weeks and I’m reporting on how the regional government’s finance committee is recommending a change in the schedule for increased taxes stemming from a mismanaged wastewater plant, some of those travel dispositions might quickly recede.

At the same time, I can write down where my mind is at, along with what I want to do in the future. After all, one of the points of this trip was to learn things about myself, and to try and build on those things for the rest of my life.

(also to ride many cool trains)

I’ll be better able to answer the question of how I’ve changed in a year or two from now. But tomorrow, I’ll be taking a plane home — and here are the things I’m going to proactively build on.

1. Hike, Photo, Art.

Let’s start with something simple, something more physical than spiritual.

One thing I didn’t fully realize when I started this trip was how it would create new routines and spark new passions.

Before this year, I didn’t really hike, often found art pretentious, and often found photography intimidating.

Now, I spend every day taking dozens of photographs to document my travels and give me deeper memories to appreciate in the future. Art galleries and hikes are two of my favourite things to do in a new city, powering my brain and my body in different ways.

It’s a joy to take those extra ten seconds to frame a shot in a more pleasing way, to feel the sweat and endorphins as I climb another 100 metres, to delight in finding a Fernando Botero sculpture in London or appreciating the tactile intricacies of Vietnamese lacquer painting.

I also like that I’m not particularly good or an expert at any of these things, nor do I feel the pressure to be: they’re just new hobbies that I can enjoy to feed my soul (and in the case of hiking, keep my blood pressure down).

I want to keep all of those feelings going, and they’re all pretty easy to do. You don’t need a world-class gallery in your town to study art history, the Pacific Northwest is a photographer’s dream, and Vancouver is arguably the best city in the world for the combination of diversity and beauty of hikes.

It’s fun to discover new hobbies. I can’t wait to keep developing them.

2. Keep Travelling

I had never travelled outside of Canada and the United States, and had no idea how much I would enjoy it.

Turns out: very yes.

I mean, this is sort of obvious, given that I continued to do this trip and that every day was full of joy of wonder.

Still, there was a possibility that I would have gone “that was a really lovely year that served its purpose, and now I’m going to retreat into a hermitic existence.”

I can’t see that happening. There are so many places I went to that I would love to explore at a less breakneck speed (South America! Central Europe! India!), and so many parts of the world that are still unexplored (Southern Africa! Central Asia! Many Parts of India!).

I very much intend to keep this spirit of exploration and joy in my life going forward, even if 52 Countries in 52 Weeks will probably never happen again.

12 Countries in 12 Months though?

Well, that has a nice ring to it.

3. Be Curious and Enthusiastic

A weird part of being a public figure is that strangers will often say what they like (or sometimes dislike) most about you to your face in their first 30 seconds of talking to you.

And two things that people will often say is they enjoy my enthusiasm for whatever information I’m sharing, and curiosity about new things I’m learning about.

These are also things I like about myself: it’s a great thrill to dive into a new topic and learn everything there is to know about it. It’s a joy to be joyful about what one is doing in the moment.

I’m glad that comes through to people, but I know there’s a flip side to these emotions, which I also have in spades: being cynical and set in my ways.

In “regular” life, it can be easy to be cynical and set in one’s ways. They are shields to get through a day, to deal with the bullshit, to not appear vulnerable. Defense mechanisms that calcify into personality traits.

Add in living in a region your entire life, when you know a lot about the things you deal with, when you love routines and report on politicians?

These are easy traits to overindulge in.

When you’re travelling the world for a year?

You have to be curious. You can’t help but be enthusiastic (and if you’re not, you should probably just go home). You touch a gator, swim in the Mediterranean, climb mountains — all things that if you were back home, you would probably run away from (well, you can’t touch a gator or swim in the Mediterranean in Vancouver, but you get the point).

If, as Roger Ebert said, film is an empathy machine, travel is a curiousity machine, for seeing something new every day, for activating all the parts of my brain that I know are beneficial.

I’ll have to be more purposeful about making that happen back home, because it won’t come automatically. But I think it’s tremendously important.

4. Stay Off Twitter

An hour before I got on the train from Vancouver to Toronto to start this journey, I gave a friend my Twitter password, told her to change it, told her not to let me back in no matter how hard I begged, and logged off the platform that had partly defined my career and where I was the most followed journalist in British Columbia.

That was a great call. Given where I am in my life, and where Twitter is in its life, I see no reason to go back.

When you get off a social media platform that you spend a lot of time on, you realize just how much it warps your brain and makes you anxious about things that don’t matter. More and more, I worry that our brains simply lack the evolutionary hardwiring to make it safe to consume the feelings and fears of thousands of people on an hourly basis.

Even if there was no controversy over the ownership of Twitter, I learned over the years that despite my number of followers, my stories got way more reach through Reddit and TikTok.

Plus, it seems to be a better bet to have a diverse way of reaching out to people, so you aren’t beholden to any one algorithm or billionaire.

I’ve spent time building up a relationship with people who enjoy my work here, on Instagram, on TikTok, and BlueSky, which seems to be a nice mix of storytelling mediums and cultural persuasions. I’ll continue to do so (and who knows, may add other sites to mix) though probably without the same passion as I did on Twitter from 2018-2022 — because again, the whole “only have one life” thing.

At the same time, there *is* a controversy over the ownership of Twitter, a person who is explicitly antagonistic to my profession, has said “Canada is not a real country”, and is the senior advisor to a person who has openly stated his desire for my nation to not exist.

If you have a different set of beliefs, all power to you.

But I can’t stay.

5. Be Around People Less

From left to right: Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Singapore

People are exhausting.

Being alone for most of this year has reminded me of this important fact, which I am reasonably sure is mostly a function of my autism: there is lots of scientific research and personal anecdotes around the extra effort it takes for neurodiverse people to constantly navigate social interactions and the Unspoken Rules of Acting Normally.

I had so much energy throughout this year, even after the “oh my god I’m travelling” honeymoon wore off, even with moving from place to place every two or three days.

And the biggest reason for all that energy is that most days I didn’t have to deal with anybody, or plan for any upcoming social interaction, outside of formalized exchanges in hotels or restaurants, or small talk with people you know you’ll never see again.

It was glorious.

I would like to have more of that energy going forward, and not feel like the tipping point of burning out. The problem is I have a large group of friends that I truly love, work in the field of journalism, and have created a unique public brand that results in strangers coming up to me in all sorts of public places.

So, some rebalancing will be required, and it’ll take a few months to figure out where that new balance will be.

It will probably be the toughest thing I do as a result of this trip. But if this year is any indication, the benefits will be enormous.

6. Embrace Smallness

I am not a religious person. I probably will never become a religious person.

But this trip has made me appreciate being humbled by all the forces in the world that are impossibly bigger than my own.

Some of the times I’ve been most overwhelmed by emotion is at the end of a particularly satisfying day, when I think about all that I’ve seen. Machu Picchu, the Pyramids, the Great Wall. The Nile, the Amazon and the Mekong. The Last Supper and Disneyland, the Olympics and Mexican wrestling, children asking for money in India, weirdos in Elmo costumes asking for money in Times Square, Japan when the trees turn colours and above the Arctic Circle when the sun stays up all night.

The enormity of our planet and the wonders of civilization are stunning in isolation, but even more powerful when the build upon themselves in different ways and places for an entire year.

Back in Vancouver, the mayor built himself a gym and talked about swagger. My friends gossiped about trivial changes and small fights. The Canucks continued to be the Canucks.

I often wonder about what it will be like to return to that world, and whether I will care as much as I once did.

But I don’t think “caring less” is the term for it, actually. Going forward, I want to appreciate my existence on this earth more, while keeping humble about how small our experiences are in the grand scheme of things, and to use that knowledge to relax, to keep things in context, and to put my deepest energies into that which truly matters.

7. Create More

The six types of creation: singing, footballing, bagpiping, running, proposing and baking. THERE ARE NO OTHERS.

And one of the things that matters for me is getting to create things.

To see all those heights of human expression has awed and inspired me on a constant basis, and made me more appreciative of the privileged platform which I possess.

I get to work for my country’s public broadcaster, and put together stories on an incredibly wide array of topics, and get to work with editors and videographers and designers to make them happen.

Outside of work, I can put together side projects that thousands of people tend to take part in or argue about, and create unique conversations about different things in the province I love.

In the grand scheme of the world, it’s not much. But it’s a perch on which to create, to find things that interest me, and to try and make something meaningful in the place I call home.

George Bernard Shaw said “Life is no brief candle to me. It is sort of spending torch which I have got to hold of for the moment, and want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on.”

For the last year I got to see the brightest of torches.

When I get home, may I continue to care about lighting my small one.