Why We Wander
Zeynep and I sometimes forget that - despite having spent literal years at this point developing our reasons for taking off from the real world - our friends and family don’t have the benefit of that history of conversation. So we get lots of questions like “Why on God’s green earth would Zeynep leave a good job at the World Bank?” and “Is Corey just a bum?” The answer to latter is sort of. The answer to the former is more complicated.
These conversations began in earnest in October 2016. We had just visited my sister, Erin, in Amman, Jordan, where she was posted for work, and watched the sun rise over Wadi Rum. We greatly admired the bold step Erin had taken, one that wasn’t comfortable or easy but certainly was life-enriching. Which squared with a conversation we had been having about “intentionality,” this vague notion we had that most people live their lives driven primarily by momentum, and that we increasingly aspired to make life choices more deliberately. (Hunter S. Thompson wrote a beautiful letter to a friend about finding your purpose in life that gets to this point; it’s well worth a read.)
Over the following months we slowly arrived at a plan: we would leave the comfort of DC, with our friends and family and home, and set off either to sail for a year or to work in Vietnam. Obviously very different options, but both checked the intentionality box for us while promising plenty of adventure.
That we ended up in Myanmar was a fluke of the right job coming open at the right time, and it certainly gave us plenty of adventure. (I’d like to note here for the record that the food in Vietnam is vastly superior to Myanmar’s.)
But we didn’t want moving to Southeast Asia for work to replace the idea of taking time just for us, for decisions and adventures that didn’t revolve around a job. So here we find ourselves, embarking on a year of wandering, complete with the requisite blog thingy for friends and family.
As our plans for future wanderings come together, we hope you’ll let us know if you have time to join us for any leg of the journey.
