Why Blog?

So I'm off to Portugal, to spend yet another week in a conference room, surrounded by 25 creative directors, analyzing and deconstructing 500 ad campaigns from around the world. My job is to transcribe the group's critiques, and craft their commentary into suggestions that might actually improve the work. I sit on a corner of the table and type at a feverish pace for about 8 hours every day, stewing in silence and growing increasingly withdrawn as the people around me talk and talk and talk... So why should I spend the handful of free moments I have writing a blog? What's the point? Why not rest the aching hands and tired mind?

I write because it's a compulsion, and because it helps me flesh out my own experience and remember who I am... These travel blogs are a means for self-preservation... I spend the other 12 hours a day relinquishing my voice and perspective to the demands of my job, and I need this space to harbor my impressions, my ideas, and my thoughts, lest they be wiped away and over-written by the pressing crush of 25 executives airing out their opinions. I write to understand where I am, to honor and respect the people I'm surrounded by, with the intention of observing and documenting the culture I'm momentarily immersed in. When you travel for business as I do, if you don't distinguish each place from the next, all your experiences start to run together into a polyglot blur of hotel bars and orchestrated business outings. I don't want to sleepwalk through my travels like that. With these blogs, I'm just trying to be fully present, to savor every meal, and to see the horizons around me clearly... I want to feel the pulse on the streets, bask in the poetry of languages I don't speak, and pore over the inherited detritus of every civilization's long history, in the hopes I might learn something. I know this is hubris, and that it's unlikely I can appreciate anything about a place from a cursory week spent in a hotel. But sometimes, in a state of exhaustion and sleep deprived inebriation I might catch a fleeting glimpse of a deeper truth in what's right in front of me, and that single moment of recognition is worth the time it takes to purge these words from my mind. In that moment, you understand that while people may be different the world over, and cultures face enormous obstacles to understanding each other, the human experience is universal, and each place and the people in it have found unique ways to articulate the paradoxes and blessings that comprise the curious state of man. Isn't that what travel is, after all? Seeing the threads of a larger tapestry? Or are these just the confused, unsolicited ramblings of a corporate scribe desperate to find meaning in the destinations he's dropped into?