What I Learned in 2024
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Bali, recharging our batteries.
What I Learned in 2024
At the risk of being a total cliche, we spent the first day of January doing a bit of big-picture planning for 2025. We were trying to figure out where to spend the last few months of the year, in a way that would balance warm and cool weather, easy and challenging destinations, movement and staying put.
It got me thinking about the overall arc of the past year, and how deliberately we balanced 2024.
I love, love, love a safari, but even the best safari is magical only for a few days. After the tenth game drive, one lion begins to look much like another. I love a beautiful beach, as well, but a surfeit of turquoise water eventually becomes ho-hum. I adore visits with and from family, but too much of any good thing is still too much.
We have always tried to balance doing with relaxing, budget with comfort, and moving with staying still. In 2024, I learned (for the umpteenth time, because I am apparently a very slow learner) that those lessons in moderation apply to much more than just travel planning—I am better off if I can balance now-and-later, less-and-more, short-and-long-term, health-and-hedonism.
A few other lessons from the year, some completely unrelated, or perhaps even opposed to, the idea of moderation:
The care and feeding of the middle-aged body is a full-time job.
I can’t get enough protein without eating chicken, and I don’t like chicken. It’s a conundrum.
I don’t like being hot. I doubt I ever will.
Related, but unrelated: there’s no such thing as too much sunscreen.
I don’t buy much stuff, but I can always find an excuse for more sunscreen. There is nothing moderate about my sunscreen supply.
I’m still scared of sharks.
I have no faith that the Grand Egyptian Museum will fully open in my lifetime, but if I can wander through the temple of Karnak as the ancients built it, no museum really matters.
The intersection between art and technology can be blow-your-mind cool, or yawn-inducing dumb. It’s hard to know which is which unless you give it a chance.
China is winning at electric vehicles—building them, selling them, driving them. Bonus: mega-city Shanghai’s streets are blissfully quiet.
There are destinations where I want to settle in and ‘live,’ but there are also destinations that I want to ‘visit.’ It is incredibly important to my mental health to not accidentally ‘live’ in a place that I only want to ‘visit.’
France is a place where I prefer to ‘live’—two months is not too much time in France. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as too much time in France. Moderation be damned.
Some hotel gyms have really good equipment. Some still have the same machines they’ve had since the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Every time I think I’m through the worst of the menopause mood swings, I go to a hotel gym and have to deal with gym bros who seem to think basic gym etiquette doesn’t apply to them, and I invariably have a wave of rage that reminds me: nope. I still hate everyone.
Gym bros are jerks no matter what country they’re from.
India is not what I thought it was on our first visit. It’s probably not what I thought it was on our second visit, either. Perhaps the world’s most populous country is more than one thing—more than even a billion things.
A destination that I have loved can also be a destination that I don’t like very much. Both of these things are possible, and that fact contains all the world’s subtlety and nuance and messy complication.
But I’m never not going to be scared of sharks.
Take care,
Lisa
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