Meantime, recently I’ve felt particularly uncertain about whether I’m doing much with myself, whether I’m really challenging myself when I’m spending most of my time around the city while my travel has waned to a couple trips to well-known destinations. Then it occurred to me that I’m doing one of the most challenging things I can: for once I’m properly trying to make the most of living in Sydney. I can live anywhere and leave it to find something new; putting this town through its paces while I’m here has been long overdue and now I’m finally putting some real effort into it.

It’s also something of a guilty satisfaction to watch from another country, especially a prosperous one, knowing I have some insulation from the self-destruction. And it’s incredibly sad to think that a place I still feel is so naturally and creatively wondrous is decaying at the hands of the paranoid and nearsighted.

Empathy for an individual may hit home, but empathy for everything you call home leaves you reeling.

Between learning JQuery and AJAX to do some long-overdue overhauling on my website, playing with my new camera, and trying to throw myself a bit more into writing, I have some real projects again. I have (modest) travel plans. I’m getting something of a social pattern to my life. My injured finger is… well, is still injured, which is a concern and source of continued frustration. But my scattered atoms of attention, lost and colliding in the excited state of heated uncertainty and pursuit of new spaces, are condensing again into a sheen of liquid intent, once again tangible yet still fluid. Only under intense pressure will they freeze into resolve; for now, I intend to let them flow along the most natural path.

- Road trip to Tasmania via ferry
- Uluru
- Kakadu National Park
- Margaret River
- Exmouth, WA to dive with whale sharks

The Tasmania road trip I’m aiming for as the next month or two, just to get things started. The ferry is much more expensive than I would have expected (close to $500 round trip for a ticket, car space, and berth for the night), but I figure with what I save on airfare and car rental, plus the amount of camping I intend to do there, it will balance out nicely. Not to mention the opportunity to have the Roo Disco with me to extend my range in the backcountry, and I think I’ll do quite well. Time to literally get this show on the road.

Where this gets tricky is finding that line between where I’m happy to extend myself regardless of the outcome because the friendship is fulfilling, and where I feel I’m overextending myself for a friendship that I will never get back enough to consider it worthwhile. I’ve never found that line, and I’m not sure I ever will. I’ve always believed everyone else established that line ages ago, while I was left floundering to grasp my place. Secretly I’ve come to think most never found the line, they just found themselves on the other side of it from me.

We went to dinner, talked like we always had, but almost with more freedom, knowing we had passed the point of treading carefully. We talked frankly about what we felt and what we would do. It’s what brought us together in the first place; neither of us were comfortable when we padded the truth. Still, even as we unwound the emotional spring that had precariously held us together for the past few months, there was still that dark electric current of tension riding my nervous system, radiating from that small corner of the brain that likes to torture you late at night with doubts about every atom in your body. That small, unhurried voice quietly muttering the simple yet scalpel-sharp question, “Did I fail?”

That night I booked an earlier flight home and the next morning I showered, packed my things, dropped my key on the table, and left. I perhaps rushed a bit, slinging my clothes on with business-like precision, feeling like lingering would only help amplify the doubt and discomfort. After a last embrace I stepped out into the cool morning and looked back once to see her silhouetted just beyond the screen door, the morning sun from the kitchen framing her as she walked away, twinkling through her hair. Another deep breath and I descended the stairs, strolling up the street to catch the last tram.

The one downside is all these things have left little time for exercise and promoted WAY more eating and drinking, something I have to get back into balance. Luckily one of the things I definitely plan to make a regular event is the Sydney Hashers, a “drinking group with a running problem”, something I’d heard plenty about from Lucy and her friends, and finally went and found last week. While there’s a fair amount of booze consumed as the post-run part of it, everyone’s at least putting in a pretty good run to counteract it. And best of all, the group is far more social than most of the climbers I’ve met here, which is both a relief and a disappointment. My climbing tribe may be totally absent in Australia, but I may have found another one to fill the space.

Some months ago, I lost sight of what I liked about myself. I was struggling to remember what I strove for, what drove me and made me truly happy. I could recall what had worked in the past, but I’d been so disconnected from it for so long, I wasn’t certain if it still applied. I was too focused on comparing myself to those around me, trying to force myself to grow and change, rather than simply accepting that I was not, and would never be, like all these things that surround me. Some of them, perhaps. But not all of them.

On my recent trip back to Oregon, I took one day out just for me, and got lost for a while, in a very literal fashion. I got in my car around 10 in the morning, found a road I had never taken, and followed it to see where it took me. I wound up into mountain passes, took gambles on new directions when I found dead ends, and generally followed my instincts along a labyrinth of roads both well-traveled and forgotten.

Sometime after lunch I found myself on a highway that kept pace alongside the bends and cascades of a river still clear and cold as it gathered speed through the mountains, while the temperature cruised steadily into the 90s, making the river look more and more alluring. After a few miles of hot wind blowing like a hair drier in my face, I decided jumping in that river was going to have to happen. Pulling off at a promisingly secluded spot, I found a recently-deserted campground with a tidy path leading down to the river, a railing made of fallen branches ending at a pool made of stacked river stones. Beyond that, the river was briefly still as the bottom dropped away into a crystal-clear blue-green hole, bound on the opposite side by a flat, sun-baked rock just made for stretching out on. There was not another soul to be seen; it was my turn to have this little patch of summertime perfection for a while.

Stripping down, I waded into the rock pool and realized the water was still shockingly cold, and swimming would not last long. I dove into the depths of the hole and came up sputtering from the shock to my system, immediately scrambling into the broad, warm rock to escape the cold. I paused, letting the heat of the air and the stone take the chill away, then with a grin I jumped right back in, whooping as I scrambled back out again, my whole body awake.

I spent maybe the next two hours there, jumping in the water, lying in the sun, and reading my book; my only sense of time was the shifting shadows of the trees moving across the banks like a giant sundial, the curves and textures in the basalt as unmarked increments saying only that time was not standing still. In that space of time, I was reminded what it was to be truly happy with who and where I was, and that whatever else I did would not change that.

Many would consider molten lava the most destructive force Hawaii has to offer, when in fact it’s the sheer unstoppable force of its climate. The steady tropical humidity will crumble rock to dirt, turn metal into red-orange piles of dust, and render photographs into indecipherable collages of paisley-patterned mold cultures. So after some coaxing, my mom finally went on a bender of scanning in old family photos in an effort to save them from certain annihilation, and recently gave me a pair of CDs loaded with the bulk of her work.

Most of the photos I hadn’t seen in over a decade, and as I looked through them the one thing that struck me the most was how completely unrecognizable my family has become from those captured moments. Somewhere in the mid-80s, that thread that tied us together started to unravel little by little, and now we’re scattered to far corners of the world, each of us very different from what we once were. It’s strange to look at photos of yourself and see a life that’s only vaguely familiar.

I’d been running for a while even before I came to Sydney, but in the past couple years I’ve started to pick it up a notch. After my shoulder surgery last year, when I was dying for any possible form of exercise I could get, I really began to pay closer attention to it, not just because it was my only outlet for months, but also because it was becoming tragically apparent that I was no longer endowed with the superhuman healing abilities of youth. My body was beginning to show faint signs of that slow, steady decline, and I did not want to help it along any further than necessary.

I’ve toyed with any number of different things: clocking my miles with a Nike+ monitor and setting goals, barefoot running, different warm-up and strengthening exercises, changing my stride and the way I land my feet, and even reading about running. I’ve by no means become a spectacular runner, but I’ve begun to amaze myself at how far I can go. I’ve started to become one of those people who runs not because it keeps me fit, but because it feels good.

This last Saturday I took advantage of the rarer winter daylight to run the trails near my house, a fantastic series of ribbons of almost primordial gullies and sandstone cliff edges along quiet backwaters of the harbor, all snaking through the middle of urban Sydney. I ran somewhere around 7 km (~4 mi), and at the end charged my way up the hill to home, energized by the feeling of strength and defiance against a hill that just weeks before had me walking and sucking wind. Sunday morning I slept in while the rest of the city packed together to run the City2Surf, but instead of taking my usual rest day, I decided that afternoon to run my own version and logged 12.5 km (~8 mi). And again, rather than staggering to my doorstep, I practically sprinted. I ran 20 km in two days and my body barely noticed.

I may have learned some lessons of getting older the hard way, but one thing it has helped me appreciate: brash, raw enthusiasm may only last so long as you careen through your teens and twenties, but you don’t have to slow down there if you pay attention to the details.