Musing on the Past

It's been two years since our last trip to China. Sometimes it feels like longer. I was browsing through our photos from the trip and found this instance where we're perched on the edge of a cliff with the monstrous hills of northern Yunnan Province looming beyond. My green-on-green earth-tone garb fails to camouflage me here (seeing as how the boldly-dressed lass at my side announces our location from miles away, but that's another matter).

So yes, I'm digging out old photos, feeling nostalgic, and getting a headache trying to remember the specific locations represented by these images. It's funny that I feel I've actually blocked out or forgotten a lot of this trip already. The pixels nudge me along, and I'm thankful for their existence. I don't take many relevant pictures on trips these days. Maybe I should get back into the habit.

On the tangent of habits, I've noticed that I could use some serious discipline in my life. I've always been too sporadic an organism-- like an amoeba on a sugar rush or some other equally random thing. It's a mode that served me well back in school: wake up early on Monday, go to school for twelve hours, come home, sleep; wake up late on Tuesday, go to school for two hours, come home, eat large burrito; wake up on Wednesday, go to zoo, ect.

Unfortunately, we humans get squeezed into all kinds of odd schedules. I worked for the company Randstad as a temp a couple months back. For that brief stint I was no longer a sporadic organism. I was mostly domesticated and on-time. I clocked in every morning at exactly 8am, save for one day that I was 3 minutes late and forced by a small-dwarf-type-supervisor-thing to fill out paperwork explaining why I was 180 seconds tardy. Interesting that the tardy forms took much longer than that to fill out.

No wonder those trips to China feel like they were so long ago. I think God's trying to break my pride with this exercise. 'Here, try some humility for size,' he says. 'It builds character.'

Hmm... I'll keep working on it. As things stand, I'm human.. and quite fallible-- a work in progress.

And so the open road beckons.