The Happiness Of Pursuit Part 6

* Attempt to begin a conversation with a stranger.

* Take only cold showers for a week.

* Sit in a public place and stare straight ahead for ten minutes.

* Make a rule that you'll reach for your gym clothes as soon as the alarm goes off (no snooze b.u.t.ton!).

* Go to work a different way or by a different form of transportation.

* Completely rearrange the furniture in your living room or bedroom.

* Vary a workout routine by choosing exercises based on dice rolls.

* Join a free foreign language meetup (visit Meetup.com and search for your choice of language).

* Offer a room of your house for rent on Airbnb.com.

* Offer your couch to a traveler on Couchsurfing.com.

* In a recurring meeting, deliberately choose a different seat.

* If you're usually active in meetings, determine to speak less. If you're usually silent, speak up!

* Post "Anything I can help you with?" on Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you gather with friends online. Respond to as many answers as you can.

* Laugh out loud in public at something that isn't funny. See what happens.

* Bring dog treats to the park and give them to strangers (primarily the ones who have dogs).

* Stop carrying an umbrella when it rains. You might get wet, but chances are you won't melt.

Some of these ideas may seem silly or irrelevant. Focus on the ones that are interesting, and if you still don't find any, create your own.

Should You Doc.u.ment Your Quest?

Yes, probably, in some fashion. But how? Some people I talked with said that they wished they'd been more attentive to doc.u.menting their journey, others happily chronicled everything, and a third group was happy to pursue their project without keeping track of all the details.

Josh Jackson, who has visited almost every baseball stadium in the United States, says that his biggest disappointment is that he didn't pay more attention to recording the experience. He wishes he'd taken more pictures and kept the ticket stubs, and there's no way to correct that now since those stadium visits are long in the past. Allie Terrell, who is hoping to visit every basilica, told me that she wished she had improved her photography skills before getting too far into the quest. "I'd love to have a complete collection of basilica photos when I'm done," she said, "But I may need to revisit some of the sites, since my early work leaves something to be desired."

Options for doc.u.mentation include: * Photography or videography * Writing or blogging * Collecting souvenirs or mementos (like Josh's ticket stubs) * Keeping a sc.r.a.pbook (either a traditional one or a digital one) * Something different It's helpful to decide what form of doc.u.mentation, if any, best suits your preferences. When I first started traveling I took a camera everywhere and dutifully attempted to take photos. I wasn't very good at photography, and I didn't always enjoy it. In fact, sometimes I even found it stressful-I realized I was spending a lot of time looking for something that would make a good picture, instead of actually enjoying my surroundings. I finally stopped taking pictures except for snapshots on my phone, and I felt relieved. I continued writing, a form of doc.u.mentation that made more sense to me.

Lesson: Complete the kind of recording that makes sense to you, not what you feel you should do. A few helpful resources for doc.u.mentation are available at FindtheQuest.com.

Everyone Is Busy

Are you busy? Join the club. Everyone is busy, yet we all have access to the same amount of time. If you want to prioritize adventure but can't find the time, something's got to give.

Sasha Martin found a way to bring the world to her dining room table in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Others found different ways to create adventure, changing their routines and bringing greater challenge into their lives.

There are two popular theories of change making: 1. Make small and incremental (but regular) changes. Mix it up.

2. Do it all at once. Quit smoking immediately. Take cold showers. Enter boot camp for the soul-whatever you need to do, don't wait.

Either of these options can work, but there's no third theory of waiting for change to knock on your door and announce its arrival. You must do something. The sooner, the better.

Remember If you're not ready to run 250 marathons in a year, you can still pursue a quest.

Don't just do something "fun." Find a way to create structure around a project and build in a timeline.

Connect your skills and interests with an extended challenge-such as visiting every basilica, or cooking nearly two hundred unique meals.

1Astute readers may note that Sasha, in planning to cook a meal from every country, has two more countries on her target list than exist on the list I used for my round-the-world tour. That's because she includes the Republic of Taiwan and Kosovo on her list. Neither are UN member states, but I've been to both.

Dispatch

ROUTINE.

The quest helped to orient me. I loved travel, even aimless travel with no set goal, but attaching it to something of greater significance gave it more weight. The quest offered a measurable objective and a series of progressive steps I could follow. Even though it was ultimately more about the journey than the eventual destination, having a destination in mind provided an anchor.

A typical two-week trip took me completely around the world, or to at least two major regions outside of North America. I'd plan the next trip as soon as I returned home, immediately sending off my pa.s.sport to another emba.s.sy or visa service to receive the necessary approval. Often I had multiple round-the-world tickets in motion at the same time, switching back and forth as I arrived in worldwide hub cities before heading out to more remote locations. If it sounds confusing, it was.

When I had trouble getting somewhere, I'd reroute the trip in real time, finding another country to visit and saving the troublesome one for later. Many of the visa applications came down to the wire, with my pa.s.sport being released just in time for the visa service to pick it up in Washington and FedEx it to me the day before my departure. More than once I'd fly to Chicago or New York, where I planned to connect to an international flight, and await the arrival of my pa.s.sport at a hotel with fingers crossed. A friend christened this the "Guillebeau Rule of Visa Applications"-you'll usually get the visa you need, but not until the last minute.

With all this travel, where did I fit in? Where was home? I was American, with an apartment in Oregon and a pa.s.sport with a blue seal, but I didn't feel especially patriotic. Coming back sometimes felt like going on another trip. Yet I was perceived as a stranger in many of the countries I visited; I was usually treated well or at least with curiosity, but always as someone foreign.

Where I truly felt at home, I learned as I went along, was on the road itself. Heading to another stop, navigating another bus system, or queuing up for another second-cla.s.s overnight train ticket-these were the activities that felt normal. The road was the routine, and the quest became a comfort.

I learned to pack the same things for every trip. Simple clothes that could layer. At least one nice shirt. Always the running shoes, if for no other reason than to inspire me to action out of guilt for lugging them so far around the planet.

Sri Lanka was my one-hundredth country. I'd been looking forward to the visit for several months, since I saw it both as a place I'd long wanted to experience and as a symbolic victory that marked the more-than-halfway point of my goal. I touched down in the capital city of Colombo on a cramped red-eye from Qatar, arriving at dawn. Immigration and the busy morning traffic took a while, so when I finally made it to the hotel around noon, I was glad to hear they had a room for me.

I dropped off my bags and took a quick walk around town. Then I laid down for a nap.

Lesson: Be careful about short naps after changing six time zones and not sleeping the night before. My power nap turned into a full-on sleep cycle. When I woke up eight hours later, my first thought was "Wow, it gets dark early here!" Then I saw the alarm clock and realized what had happened. After sleeping through the entire afternoon and evening, I knew I'd be up for the rest of the night.

It turned out that staying up all night in Colombo was surprisingly fun. I had a balcony in my room that overlooked a beach, directly next to the main downtown area. At the time of my visit Sri Lanka was engulfed in a longstanding civil war. The capital city was safe, but foreigners were discouraged from traveling farther out. Soldiers stood watch on every street corner.

I wandered out onto the beach, waving to the soldiers and a group of children who were still out playing soccer despite the late hour. I walked back and forth along the sand under a high moon, watching the waves rush in and out. "One hundred countries!" I said out loud. So far, so fast, yet still so much further to go.

Back in the hotel I got comfortable and set up a mobile office for the night. I was working on an overdue writing project, and I decided there was no time like the present to knock it out. Breakfast was at least six hours away. I boiled water for Nescafe and settled in, drafting my pages and pacing the room for a break every hour.

As the sun peeked through the clouds I was almost done. First in line at the restaurant, I ordered two plates of food and more coffee.

What a crazy life, I thought. Here I am in Sri Lanka, watching the sunrise after staying up all night in my one-hundredth country. Yet it all felt normal.

A couple of days later, my sleep cycle having never really adjusted, I boarded a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong. Many more countries lay ahead, and I was eager to keep going.

Strange as it was, this was my new routine.

Chapter 7.

Time and Money

All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?

-BANKSY Lesson: BEFORE BEGINNING A QUEST, COUNT THE COST.

I first met twenty-one-year-old Nate Damm in Portland, Maine. A group of us were sitting at an outdoor cafe, and Nate was the quiet guy in a corner, paying attention but not saying much. After everyone else had talked for a while, a mutual friend caught my eye and pointed to Nate. "You should hear what this guy is doing next year," he said.

Nate looked pained at being the center of attention, but then explained that he was planning to walk across the entire United States, from Maine to San Francisco. He was so quiet that I had to ask him to repeat himself. "You're doing what?"

He told me again, matter-of-factly, that he'd arranged to leave Maine the following spring and walk all the way to the West Coast over the next six or seven months. Everyone at the table had questions-ones you could tell he'd heard many times before.

"Really, you're walking across America?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I just feel like I should. I've had this idea for two years and it won't go away."

"How?"

"Backpack, walking shoes, sleeping bag."

I went away impressed, but also wondering if he would actually do it. The walking path that Nate had chosen spanned more than three thousand miles and crossed several different climates, including an extended stretch through the Mojave and Great Basin Deserts in Nevada.

Nate was committed, though. As soon as the New England weather warmed after a cold winter, he packed up everything he could carry in a backpack and hit the road. From Maine he marched down through Pennsylvania and out toward the Great Lakes region. The first day was exciting ("I'm on the road!") and the second was tiring ("My feet aren't used to this."). After a while, routine set in and his muscles adjusted to regular days of walking six hours or more.

Still in the early weeks of the trip, he had a tough moment in West Virginia after a particularly hard day. Nothing had worked as he hoped-he was worn down, feeling especially alone, and a rainstorm that had started in the morning continued nonstop through the afternoon. On the verge of a physical and mental breakdown, he forced himself to back up and think about why he was doing the walk. The self-reflection helped: He realized that even though there would be plenty of hard days like this one, he valued the overall experience enough to persevere. His courage and stamina restored, he crossed the state line and kept going.

After growing accustomed to the pattern of daily progress, albeit sometimes in the rain, Nate settled into life in the slow-but-steady lane. Every day he'd get up and walk. Sometimes he'd meet people along the way. Truck drivers stopped to pa.s.s him water (and once in a while, beer). Strangers invited him into their homes for dinner. Other days, he would be on his own the whole day, putting mile after mile on his canvas hiking boots as he slogged through the Midwest and kept moving toward California. Either way, the task was the same: putting one foot in front of the other, literally.

My favorite part of talking with Nate after his trip was when I asked him about the struggles he encountered. "Walking across the country sounds like a crazy and unimaginable idea to most people," he told me. "But once I got going, the execution was easy. It was pretty much just 'wake up and walk all day.' "

After I'd been to my first fifty countries, I started writing about the quest to go everywhere, sharing my experiences on a blog. A few people began to follow along with the journey, and some wrote in to share feedback of all kinds. Most comments were positive, but I had my share of critics as well. When it comes to travel, everyone has an opinion on how to do it and the rules you should follow. One guy was dismissive: "This is easy. To go to every country, all you need is enough time and money."

He meant it as a critical comment, and at first I was upset. "Easy! This isn't easy. You try taking a thirty-hour bus ride through East Africa or a bush taxi to an overland border crossing."

But then I thought more about what lay at the core of the criticism. I once heard someone say that criticism is like a nut surrounded by a hard sh.e.l.l. The hard sh.e.l.l represents a projected experience from a biased perspective-something you should discard and ignore. If you can successfully discard the criticism's outer trappings, there is often something you can learn from its core, especially after you've allowed some time to pa.s.s.

In the case of the "time and money" comment, I realized there was a lesson I could apply. I'd always been somewhat methodical about goal setting. I spent the better part of a week every December reviewing the year that had just pa.s.sed and planning ahead for the next one. The quest to visit every country came about only after I spent a lot of time thinking through the logistics. Focusing on those details-the how of the quest-was actually a benefit, not something to be disparaged or deemphasized. The quest was successful because I'd thought it through-not in spite of it.

Counting the Cost

It was true: If I broke down the overwhelming project of visiting 193 countries before the age of thirty-five into a long series of small tasks, most of the problems I had to solve became much more manageable. It all started when I first tallied the estimated cost of scaling up from 50 countries to 100 countries. I guessed that it would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000, and that it would take approximately five to seven years to complete. My first thought upon doing the math was: "Wow, that's all?"

I didn't have an extra $30,000 just lying around, but I realized that if I lived frugally, over the course of several years 100 countries wouldn't be an un.o.btainable goal. As I grew closer to completing that goal, I realized that it was within my grasp to actually visit every country. Going everywhere would be more expensive and challenging than going to a limited number of places (especially since when I set my original goal, I had the luxury of picking and choosing my destinations), but I knew it was possible by solving one problem at a time. The thought process was like this.

What if I go to every country in the world?

No way! That's impossible!

Why not? What would it take?

A lot of time ... probably a lot of money ... and I'll probably have to factor in certain variables I haven't considered.

How much time? How much money? What might those other variables be? Let's figure it out.