Travel bunnies sing travel songs

I find it easier to write with music in my ears, literally. I need headphones, for some reason the effect is completely different when the music is coming through external speakers. There you go. It’s my meditation.

So here I am, Stevie Wonder playing, and I’m taking a break from everything.

I often wonder why life pans out the way it does. Little differences, slight shifts in timing, the simplest decisions, can all change your life in the most profound ways. Robs and my path had run almost parallel for four years, we travelled Europe at the same time, both caught the U2 POP Tour within days of each other, both lived in Cape Town for a year before deciding to come back to London, spent almost 2 more years here, before we ended up meeting at a party neither of us had any intention of going to. Is that destiny or is it possible that it was just perfect timing? Was I always going to change my mind while on a train going home (from an ex-girlfriend) and decide to go to the party? Was Robs always going to go to the world’s worst house party, before a friend of a friend suggested gate-crashing another party he knew about in West Hampstead?

Personally I don’t believe in destiny. I feel we have complete control over the decisions we make. It was more the experience of talking to her for the first time and feeling like we had been having this conversation our entire lives, than any supernatural force, that brought us together. Maybe we’re given the occasional nudge in the right direction, but the rest is up to us.

Maybe it was better that I didn’t meet Robs when she and Gina left South Africa for Europe with backpacks bigger then them and without a clue about the adventures that lay ahead. I wouldn’t want to have taken anything away from their trip that gave them a lifetime worth of memories and a never-ending supply of stories to tell.

Some say they should write a book about their adventures.

So they are!

The best part about revisiting memories, especially when you concentrate on a specific space in time when great adventures were had, is that you never really know what you will find. It’s almost like travelling again.

Who knows, maybe I did bump into them along the way?

Then again, while some people are always geared to form part of the chorus, they were always destined to be lead singers.

And when travel bunnies sing travel songs, they are not easily forgotten.