“This is the longest I have seen you enjoy tilting at a windmill“. A few days ago, an old friend made this casual comment that made me introspect a bit. Let me explain.
This aforementioned friend has maintained that I am forever chasing difficult to impossible (to even possibly foolish) ventures. When I look back, there seems to be something in this. You see, my jobs whether they were in start-ups or in big companies always involved conceptualising something new and setting it up. Not that it has been a conscious process; but it has inevitably been the outcome. Must be that I like the ‘moulding clay’ nature of ambiguity that surrounds a venture or an initiative. Or maybe it allows me the freedom to express my two dominant character flaws – the need to be creative & the desire to triumph as an underdog. Unfortunately, it has a flip side. Like falling in love, once the rush of ambiguity is over and the venture is up & running smoothly, usually in less than three years from the start, I lose all interest in it.
So when I decided to set up a project to help our countrymen find good information on their path to becoming some of the world’s most avid travellers, sceptically raised eyebrows were par on course. But, I have been resolutely at it for three years now and I am still enjoying it throughly – ready to go on. Seems to me there are many more hills to climb on this one. That does surprise me somewhat.
John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is the best travelogue – probably even the best book – I have ever read. In that, the camper van he travels in is called Rocinante, which was Don Quixote’s mount while he went tilting at windmills. If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is..
The Long Hol 