sage advice

I can’t recall if there was an exact moment that Aman and I decided that, yes, we were going to do this…  we were going to put “life” on hold for a year and have an epic adventure around the world.  It was more of a slow progression that started with a whimsical conversation over a bottle of wine, I’m sure, and ended with us – weeks, if not months, later – sitting on the floor of our Tribeca apartment one night with my beaten-up Rand McNally world atlas, and scribbling down our respective “top fives” – the five countries that we each needed to see, if we were going to go for it.  I think that’s the moment, for the both of us, when it started becoming real.  At that point, we had spoken with close friends, family and, at times, total strangers about what we were thinking.  I expected the general reaction would go something like – Are you two crazy?  But, surprisingly enough, it was the total opposite – folks were excited for us, and downright supportive.  I will never forget one conversation in particular I had with a friend’s grandmother over the summer.  Despite her 90-something years, she was a sharp lady (I heard she bought shares of Apple through its IPO, back in the day).  She was also very well traveled and truly one of the nicest people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.  Within minutes of our introduction, she said to me – Do you want to know what keeps me young?  I have one drink of vodka every day.  Steal my heart….  Later in the afternoon, after Aman got ahold of her ear for long enough to tell her our plans, she approached me again to tell me how fabulous she thought it was.  She told me to do it now – go, before we have kids and college tuitions to pay, because by the time our kids have grown up, our knees may not work anymore.  Apparently, we don’t think about this when we’re young.  I laughed, and decided to myself, that this likely was the best advice I would receive about whether or not we should commit to this trip.  Since then, I have thought about this advice often, perhaps most recently, when Aman and I were in Thailand on the beautiful island of Phi Phi.  While there, we got this crazy idea one day that we should walk up to the “viewpoint” to watch the sunset, which is a popular enough thing to do while on Phi Phi.  No one told us that this required an incredibly steep climb (maybe it should have been obvious) – the viewpoint is 186 metres above sea level and the only way up involves walking up stairs after stairs.  For the finale, there is a windy, uneven footpath that rises sharply up the side of a mountain.  We didn’t realize just how high we were going until we were half way up and, at that point, we figured we might as well keep going – we were half way there.  By the time we got to the top, we were sweaty and winded, but the view was well worth the effort.  And as we watched the fading sunlight, I took a moment to be grateful for our good knees.  

Cheers Mrs. Kaufman.