13 years, 13 lessons—life, love, and that whole humanity shebang
- Miles Astray
- May 16
- 15 min read
Updated: May 20
sharing some brain muffins for my 13th rebirthday
13 years ago, I traded home for the world. A great deal, if not without sacrifice. What started out as a one-year baby-trip is now a teenager. Enough time to learn a thing or two or thirteen. For my 13th rebirthday, I want to share these little brain muffins, each one accompanied by a new print to drive that lesson home.
don’t borrow from tomorrow
It’s easy to envision happiness, inner peace, and self-actualization as places to arrive at. It’s harder to perceive them as places we’re already inhabiting. Given that our favorite future might never materialize, while the present is a given gift, here’s a makeshift manual for finding what we are looking for here and now, not then and there:
read on
Second things first: I do encourage the long game. Completing the big picture is a pursuit and a pursuit is work. Sometimes we might need to sacrifice our short-term happiness for the end game. Our couch offers comfortable, blissful, and easily-accessible joy any day. But to find deeper happinesses like love or becoming, we need to wave the comfort zone goodbye.
That said, the more I live, the more my lifelong pursuit of happiness is turning into a daily quest, seeking those little presents of the present. Sometimes, paying attention is all you need to invest: noticing your health, catching a fleeting smile between elevator doors, absorbing a flavor like it was the first and last time, sunshine, plants. Other times, it’s about making that bit of space for the little things: a walk, a book, a song. Surprisingly, we overlook the big things just as easily: our family that won’t be around forever, a love that was everything before we started taking it for granted, and again, and again, and again—can’t say it often enough—our health, which we only ever notice and miss once we fall ill, only to appreciate it for half a day once we get better.
Sipping retirement cocktails on a tropical island isn’t an unreasonable longing. But sipping coffee on a rainy day downtown while simply being well is a reasonable meantime.
the less you need, the more you have
The more things we own, the more things own us. During my first year of travel I was robbed at gunpoint and lost everything—an involuntary lesson in going minimal and one of the best things that could have happened to me. Here's why:
read on
Minimalism is liberating. Less stuff, less to worry about, less dependency. I’d started my trip with an entire closet stripped to my back, which taught me painfully that the longer you travel, the less you should pack. Later I realized that it wasn’t just a travel lesson, but a life lesson. Now, 13 years into my trip, I only travel with hand luggage (a 36 l backpack and a daypack). The rest of my belongings fits into a cardboard box at my parents’ (mostly childhood keepsakes and books). But minimalism doesn’t just free you from material weight, it is also financial lightness. No car, no TV, no furniture—no expenses.
Over the years, I also met a lot of people who had less, but smiled more. Because the things that really make us happy, aren’t things at all—health, social ties, love—and those less focused on the amassment of material wealth have more bandwidth to engage with their surroundings meaningfully. Work more to buy more is an expensive and wasteful calculation that costs us what really matters.
whatever you choose, coincidence chooses you
We like things to be predictable and plannable, but without divine skills those attributes are above our paygrade. We’re merely overengineering a cage to capture the mirage of a controllable life. Life can, does, and will change from one moment to the next without us having a say in it, and I’ve learned that in the softest and hardest ways. Here’s the key to survival in an inherently chaotic and wild world:
read on
As much as I advocate for dreaming big and aspiring fiercely, I believe in planning pragmatically and flexibly. I’m still on a path through life’s big picture that I sketched out early on, but most of the details in that picture were filled in by chance along the way. Random encounters and experiences I couldn’t have predicted in a million years if predicting was all I did. And even who I am as a person is in large parts circumstantial. We talk a great deal about nature and nurture, but coincidence calls them nobodies.
I wouldn’t be who and where I am today if it wasn’t for that arbitrary and unlikely Thursday night a thunderbolt of love split my heart into two torn halves, or that accidental year in Ecuador where they handed me a chisel to reshape a mentality that looked set in stone. For better or worse, but certainly known for a fact, the architecture of the world is chaotic and wild like a Hundertwasser building, so flexibility is part of the house rules. Survival isn't strength, intelligence, or even resilience. Survival is adaptation. In Cuba, where most citizens are not only deprived of material possessions but also prospects, they say “el Cubano inventa” (the Cuban comes up with something). Some face harder blows than others, but we all gotta roll with the punches. And it gets a lot easier if you’re a stan of change. To me, the uncertainty of not knowing where I’ll be a decade, a year, or even a month from now doesn’t translate into angst but freedom.
we have differences in common
Exploring humanity’s fabric across the globe, one finds a stunning complexity of patterns but a unifying simplicity at the thread level. Here’s my take on why we need both diversity and unity:
read on
People live vastly different lives across the planet, but the more so within one nation, region or group. Everywhere you find the same distinctions: optimists and pessimists, introverts and extroverts, those lending hands and those weaponizing elbows, dreamers and doers, dreaming doers. Playdough in the hands of nature, nurture, coincidence, and a bit of our own decision making, we are formed into all sorts of character shapes, steered by the same drives. These conspicuous similarities, our universal differences, unite us as one species of monkey merely disguised in a human wardrobe. In the same breath, our distinct experiences assemble unique minds, feelings and memories—our very own worlds.
Our diversity as people makes us adaptable to life’s challenges. Our unity as humankind makes us effective. And both our similarities and differences are brilliant teachers. We can learn healthy balances from our differences: living day by day might look a bit shortsighted, while living solely for retirement can look very farsighted; some could lay back a little more, some could step up a little more. Our similarities, on the other hand—a hand to lend—are lessons of relatability: when we realize that all of us laugh and suffer, help and hurt, fail and fight, we know that we are equal.
routine shrinks memory
Our memory is a river. To interrupt the daily flow, you need to drop anchors—distinct moments that the mind can hold on and return to. It’s easy to remember the day you swam in a turquoise rainforest stream. It’s impossible to remember the office Wednesday before last. Routine shrinks entire years down to days because they are all the same in retrospect. This is my take on how to pack some extra into the ordinary to create lasting memories:
read on
If we don’t leave knots along our synapses, there’s nothing to trace our memories. Whole years can disappear from our recollection if we don’t tether them to anything noteworthy. As much as I loved those years in Montreal and Paris during the pandemic, I don’t remember much of them. But there were years along my journey that feel like complete symphonies of memories resounding with hundreds of discernable elements and plots. To look back onto a long, full life, one needs to take breaks from the mundane. Travel is an obvious dose of novelty—new places, new cultures, new experiences. But once you slow your travel down to a nomadic pace and settle in places along the way, you’re living a routine again, if with a foreign twist. A thorough escape comes down to domestic recipes for the unusual: trying a new dish you can’t even pronounce, a never-done-that activity, exploring a new route across a familiar city, making a new friend, meeting a new lover, a party that you will tell neither your parents nor your kids about.
be a perspective detective
Everything is a matter of perspective, so we best get some. As much as I love for my ambitions to drive me towards dreams that are as far as they are fat, I mustn't forget to check the rearview mirror to see how far I’ve come already. Here are some tips to exercise the perspective and appreciation muscles:
read on
Whether I'm fully accomplished or a million miles away from my goals, a billion lightyears away from my aspirations, and an infinity away from my dreams, has very little to do with any external metric, and almost everything with my mood that day. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by work and my to-do list seems of biblical proportions. Chisel in hand, ready to chip away at it, I realize that the only effective way to work on it is to not work on it. Instead, I go for a walk. It’s out there that I come to terms with the fact that I can’t build Rome in a day. By the time I get back, my to-do list looks like a post it note. Whether my world looks up or down or upside down, doesn’t depend on the world. It depends on whether I hold my head up high or keep it hanging. Whether you delight me or annoy me has less to do with your actions and more with how hungry or sleepy I am. Whether I put you on a pedestal or label you obnoxious depends more on who I am than on who you are.
And here are some perspective anecdotes if you’ve got nothing better to read:
read on
Namibia, 2017. It started with a disheartening noise somewhere deep inside the car’s guts, and as the engine sputtered out we pulled over onto the desert shoulder. The night really is darkest before the dawn and the red glow by the trunk was vivid against the blackness. “The car is on fire,” she said. I thought it was the hazards flickering in a cloud of sand our tires had whirled up. She was right and I was wrong, and the other half of our quartet had already started bolting away from the car like springboks. It was an oily fire somewhere underneath the trunk where a fat jerrycan brimming with gasoline was begging for its big moment. But the more certain I was that the whole thing would blow up any moment, the more I dragged my feet, heavy with the imminent loss of all my tangible and intangible possessions in that car—every notebook page a piece of my heart, every picture a piece of my memory. We sat down at a safe distance and I just waited for the car and my heart to blow up synchronously. That loss would be killer, but then again, at least we were still alive.
Cairo, 2023. I see two kids steal bread. Stealing doesn’t seem very right, but when you’re hungry it doesn’t seem very wrong either. Perspective. Then again, they didn’t steal from a mega corporation but from a street vendor that seemed just as poor. Perspective.
Colombia, 2012. It’s the beginning of my trip. I’m hanging on the lips of an old foreigner in a hostel. He veils himself in suggestive mystery and the more I ask the less he tells. “My story has been told too many times,” he says more smug than humble. His travel-vanity is glaring but I can’t see it yet. “What a seasoned traveler,” I think. A little later I step off the beaten trail for a long time. Mexico, 2014: 2.5 years into the journey. He doesn’t remember me, but I do. Same man, different hostel. This time he’s chattering away despite my growing disinterest. He goes on about how traveling is too easy now, too crowded, too touristy. That’s why he won’t visit the Mayan ruins at Tulum. I see it now. “What a condescending traveler,” I think. When I met him for the first time, my Spanish companion Angel was as much at the end of his trip as I was at the beginning of mine. He had turned away from that conversation at the old guy’s first pretentious syllable.
That same Angel had a whole other matter of perspective that kept him from wasting time on people who waste your time: cancer. He’d beat it, and when he did, he stopped following the path society and his father had laid out for him, to do what he really loved: teaching. Movielike.
more good people wouldn’t be bad
What the world needs most are good people. Plain and simple. Not leaders, not scientists, just good people. Everything else is a perk. With climate chaos, lust for war, and abysmal disparities looming, humanity will have to come together or else. But how do we find or form good people?
read on
Volunteering with grassroots nonprofits in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, I got to meet an entire army of good people fighting for the right thing. I mostly worked with projects related to education, which I consider a key to most doors. And while academics are good and well to foster knowledge and analytical skills, it is high time to flesh out the bony ethics skeleton schools work with. That’s why Imagine Scholar—a unique South African afterschool program—resonated with me in particular, and I couldn’t say it better than founder Corey Johnson: “I’m incredibly proud of all the huge successes, but the real goal is to create good people. I’d be more proud if they become good mothers, fathers or coworkers, just good people; because that’s what the world needs.”
it’s opposite day every day
We all crave pleasure while nobody cares for pain. But pain and pleasure are on the same scale, forever linked. So are hot and cold. Life and death. These opposites cannot exist without each other. I already made the case for good people (#7). Read on to find out why shitty people have their place too.
read on
There is a duality to everything in existence. Without darkness, there would be no light. Literally as much as figuratively. If brightness was constant across the universe, we wouldn’t notice it as a discernable attribute of reality. We wouldn’t be able to detect it, neither scientifically, nor conceptually. We wouldn’t have a word for it. In the same vein, life does not only derive its meaningfulness from death, but its very existence. We need to die to live. Which means, all those aspects of existence that we fear and despise, have their place. Downs are inevitable if we ever want to experience ups. Hate gives us love. Pessimists beget optimists. And shitty people make good people all the better.
We should absolutely strive for a better world with fewer bullies and less despair. But if we don’t acknowledge and accept the fact that positives will always come in twin packs with negatives, we’re chasing unicorns across rainbows.
good friends come fast and go slow
When you intersect with people along desire lines (those informal pathways created by foot traffic between society’s paved roads), it is likely that they are likeminded. They are in the same place as you are, doing the same thing. And tuned into the same wavelength’s frequency, you might harmonize instantly and on levels that transcend culture, profession, and age. Mere moments shared with such instant friends can bond you for life. But don’t discard your childhood friends quite yet:
read on
The base for our first friendships in life is locality. Same neighborhood, same school, same club. We share an everyday experience that will make us laugh for decades to come. But we’re still a goo of potentials that has yet to solidify into individual personalities. It isn’t before adulthood that we discover who we are and what we want, and how different we might be from some of those by our side. Climbing into our mold alongside new people that we meet at work or university can form friendships around interests and intellect. Quick bond that glues together not only our hearts but also our minds. There is a time for that in life, and later on it gets more difficult to find new avenues towards lasting friendships. Traveling might be the ultimate shortcut. As a traveler, it’s impossible not to run into likeminded people, from fellow 9-2-5 escapees to the locals you might live and work with if you’re on that kind of journey. The occasional soul sibling might even know you—the deep you—better after one afternoon than your kindergarten buddy ever has. Then again, that buddy knows you as a book, not a chapter.
the place does and doesn’t matter
My trip taught me early on that the place matters less than who you share it with and what memory-making experiences you get up to there. Further into my journey I realized that that’s only half the truth. Read on for the whole truth and nothing but the truth:
read on
While I stand by the notion that people and happenstance can abracadabrafy any place into a paradise, some places become personal paradises without such tricks. I was afraid to go back to Granada, Spain ten years after I spent one of those summers of my life there. I knew that summer feeling was largely owed to the people that sweetened it, and now I was to be there all by myself. But I still loved it. And how could I have not. Granada is an objectively perfect place, and anyone who says differently is a liar. Love culture: Granada. Love nature: Granada. Love food: Granada. Love drinks: Granada. Love sunsets: Granada. Love sunrises: Granada. Any place can be the right place for you under the right conditions. But not every place can be the right place for you under the wrong conditions. PS: my moderated expectations certainly helped (#11).
if your expectations are tall, prepare for the fall
Fellow travelers are always quick to build tall expectations for you, based on their personal experience in a place. That’s how they ruined Rio, Istanbul, and Thailand for me. Well, Thailand was also a mosquito’s fault. Read on to find out how one mosquito can ruin an entire country, and how to moderate and not moderate expectations inside and outside of travel:
read on
Boy had they talked up Rio, Istanbul, and Thailand. And boy o boy were those places letdowns for me. Our experiences are built around the expectations we scaffold. Lowered expectations can elevate the experience, higher expectations can overshadow it. Same with the expectations we project onto people, oftentimes outsizing them unfairly. But that is not to say that we should never hoist up any expectations. After all, they also go by such lovely names as Joyful Anticipation or Glorified Goddess. And in the defense of Rio, Istanbul, and Thailand (should they need one in my high court of biased opinion), Rio had a hard time to shine in all that rain and with the gloomy goodbye mood I had schlepped there from Buenos Aires on a 48h bus ride, Istanbul might not be at its liveliest in the midst of winter, and Thailand could have been more fun without the dengue fever and without cancerous tourism metastasizing all over the place.
live fulltime
If a day has 24h, which they usually do, 8h of work and 8h of sleep make up two thirds. In theory, the remaining 8h are for living, but in practice we’ll have to deduct the time we spend in the kitchen, in the bathroom, or in traffic, running errands or obeying other obligations, unless we consider doctor’s appointments and the likes leisure activities. There isn’t all that much time left for living at the end of the day, but there are ways to get some back:
read on
Need less, buy less, work less. Admittedly, I might be taking minimalism to an extreme (#2), but the less you need, the less you need to work for it. During my years as a nomadic freelancer, I never worked fulltime. As little as two hours a day were enough to keep traveling the world fulltime, live well (enough), and even feed that savings account solid portions. I spent a good chunk of my freed-up time on volunteering, traveling, and living, but most of it went into taking care of my passion baby—this here project—which never felt like work, even on the 16h days. If you love what you do, work won’t be work—It’ll be a hobby, so that part of your day won’t feel like a waste of life. Speaking of which:
Most of us won’t get around working some 75,000 hours per life to make a living. And those 75,000 can feel like 750,000 if your job mostly consists of counting down the minutes to clock off, desperately awaiting the next weekend, longing for that vacation to arrive sooner, and dreaming of your retirement escape. Finding a vocation you enjoy or even love doesn’t mean that every workday will be easy and fun. But if you do something you hate, hardly any workday will be easy and fun. Unless you…
work with the right people. A healthy work environment with friend-like colleagues con elevate the shittiest gig, while a toxic workplace will ruin even the dreamiest of jobs.
real love is a fact
I don’t know if “the one” exists (just that our odds of finding them make the lottery seem a sure bet). What I do know, for a fact, is that real love exists. Here’s how I know:
read on
I’m not claiming that real love is real because I’ve experienced it. I’m saying it because I’ve felt it. Real love is a feeling, like hunger. Of course you can pinpoint why you love a person—their repartee, determination, or laugh—but that’s as superfluous as explaining why you are hungry. It’s just so. It's not a feeling that ricochets in the brain, like happiness does. Love reverberates in your gut, like gravity does. Love is a force of nature. When I started my trip in Colombia, I had long stopped loving her. But then I dreamt of her one night, and in that dream she said something corny along the lines of “in this universe we are all out of straws, but there is a parallel world where we’re still together,” and it was true for as long as the dream was on, and suddenly the feeling was back—pure, undeniable love—like the zero-gravity you're feeling when you're flying in a dream. You can say that love is home, or that love is a soulmate. But underneath there, love is love. And that real love is everything. But it also costs you everything. It’s the stuff the devil deals in—like souls. Sooner or later, you’ll have to pay up. It’s not for everyone. And there is nothing wrong with plain old domestic bliss, the nine-to-five of relationships. Maybe all I ever wanted really was to get a pizza with a side of companionship and watch two movies in a row on a Saturday night. Be bored together and that kind of thing.
There's really no need to get me anything for my rebirthday and travel anniversary, but if any of these brain muffins were to your liking, that print has your name on it—well, my name, but, you know. Limited editions of 13 in a 13"x13" (33x33cm) format.
Thanks for tagging along,
Miles