There are days where we pack up our bags to leave our worst selves for better ones. I guess this was one of those times. Could be also drunk when I decided to bike 500km across Eastern and NorthEastern Thailand as an act of rebelling against the anachronistic morality of the Singaporeans’ norm. I like the unconventional choices that I make when I explore my options, it's emboldening, despite being admittedly innately afraid of my experiments. Out of plain sight, out of line, but they are my choices, I'll take ownership of them regardless of the outcomes. There is no real justification on what compelled me to attempt what I did, it just unfolded the way it did without any prior expectations.
Travelling alone, or rather living alone is alot about bearing the weight of loneliness that comes with the decision to act on your own, to initiate activities to feel inclusive in a new environment. Riding a motorbike might sound outrageous to many who fail to look beyond the peripherals, but if you think of it in another perspective, you are merely integrating in the norm of the culture you are temporary living in. It’s not even trying hard to be an outlier or shocking, it’s learning how to participate in the shoes of a local. The bare minimum. The motorbike is essentially a tool, you are the subject that can either make it a functional benefit or a hazard. Observe the basic traffic rules, and generally feel the roads as you ride along different terrains, pretty much what common sense entails.
Alot of this attempts are very fresh to me too, and knowing well that I am consciously unskilled means that I am more aware of my surroundings. I’m merely grasping the new circumstances and reinventing with new solutions along the way. You operate the same way with life when shit happens. Nothing too shocking about it. Same same but different. #Tinglish
Feeling the balance and listening to intuition is what embodies the art of moving forward to being consciously skilled, in everything we do. The roads can get really rough, or the weather slaps you hard in your face or when one of your ankles gets crushed under the weight of your bike when you skid on a slippery roads. It isn’t all that fun when you are stuck in the pitch dark highways when you are caught in unsafe situations that you don’t desire to be in.
Here's a confession, I did fall off my bike, twice in fact, might have even been a close shave to death once, but well, I did survive to write this post. I was a ridiculously horrible driver when I first started in Chiang Mai. I got better controlling the bike along the way, along with a couple of face palm moments.
General rule of thumb, if you witness any road accidents on the cross junction, here’s a fair warning. Stay away from it. Yes, I know it’s human nature to react to such circumstances in hopes of helping, but being a foreigner, you will be held liable of the person or be pinned as the culprit. Either way, you won’t be in a good place. You would rather stay morally guilty by the sidelines.
I’m scared of many things, lightnings, thunders, leeches, snakes, feeling lonely. But I am also made up of guts and guns, scars and bruises, battered clothes and bare minimum luxuries. Might not have been the most smooth sailing bike trip, but least I'll never have to question the possibilities of what if. It's proven that desperation drives you to an exit of despair into the entrance of an opportunity. I can’t say that I’m completely at ease doing things alone but I’ve been more comfortable with myself lately. Stepping into places and doing things that are conventionally social. Embarrassment isn’t much of an issue these days to think about. I guess that’s the charm of being based somewhere foreign where you don’t have a standard to uphold. You do you. You are the independent variable to all the circumstances that runs by you. Loneliness has transcend from a stranger to a friend as you balance the struggles of living in your own terms. Funny how we undervalue our own companionship when we need it the most.
You’ll find yourself liberated by the new circumstances that appears so sporadically, some encounters that inspires you, other shines light to the facade of reality. I think we all desire to be a kid sometimes. It's powerful to feel everything again for the first time. When the feeling lingers around intense and vivid, you could almost touch it. I'm sick of the Asian girl stereotypes that are constantly pinned on me like we are supposed to be duplicates of one another.
In any case, I'll always stay the curious and contrarian person that I am.