50 Days 'Til 50 Day 38--Spanish Class

50 Days 'Til 50(or 13 Days After 50)Day 38Spanish ClassIt always takes me exactly three days, fourteen hours, and nine minutes when I travel far and away to completely let go. You know, to let it ALL go. The grueling 17 hour travel day to get here to Sitges, Spain combined with spurts of adrenaline and then complete exhaustion, this all experienced in the first day. The next several are getting my bearings, finding the perfect coffee shop, not caring that I'm the whitest body at the beach, and not reaching for my phone every five seconds (this becomes my true barometer of relaxation in this day and age and as my partner calls it "completely disconnecting.")I've been extremely fortunate to have been born with the travel bug. As a young boy growing up as a child of a hotel owner the hotel was only closed for one month a year, January. Not the ideal month to travel in the harsh depths of a New England winter but my sister and I were assured to be yanked out of school so the family could take off for what I now know was probably my parents favorite time of year. We would go to Boston at the closest and California at the furthest and I always had that smug grin on my face as we frolicked in the warm sun knowing most of our cohorts were shoveling snow and chopping wood for the fire. I guess if truth be known I have that same grin on me now, surrounded by the Mediterranean breezes and about 300 men and women mostly wearing nothing but their sunscreen.The truth is I love to experience, well, new experiences. As much as I love the routine of home life with my partner Jeff; going to work, making dinners at night, the occasional night out with friends, reading a good book, I love being somewhere new, different, exhilarating, unfamiliar. Yet somewhere in my search to find things that challenge me into further opening my mind, or obsessing over the differences in all of us, slipping into what I think I should be, I'm returned in the end to the realization that we are all the same. When you scrape away all the stuff, all the distractions of life, we are fundamentally the same.Yes some are louder, ruder, bigger, smaller, more tan, LESS tan, more muscles, whiter teeth. Some can't stop talking about themselves, some are more maternal in their need to make sure everything and everyone is ok. Some are more athletic, some are better cooks, some can recite Proust, some can recite the stock market, some are more artistic and some are just downright glum. I've strived and struggled my whole life to be myself in all areas of my life not listening to all the chatter rattling about in my head. As a dear friend begged me once at the way to immature age of 23, "Josh, when are you going to get real?" It's to have been a lifelong battle. Trying not to compare myself to others but to relate. Not to dream of what I don't have but to be grateful for what I do, wishing to knock someone's head off but walking away instead, not to hate but to love.I suppose like anything in life's journey when you have that ah-ha moment where you realize that it's all ok, that all is as it is, and that it's really ok just to be where, who, and what we are. For its in these moments I get to be the real me. Without judgement, without feeling lack or feeling less than or better than. In those sometimes fleeting moments of complete and utter acceptance of myself and all those around me as being exactly as it's supposed to be. I'm pretty convinced this is what's referred to as heaven on earth. For I think even the most masochistic and sadistic among us to their very core at day's end want a shoulder to cry on or a hug to make it all better. Don't they?Lying on the beach now for the 9th day in utter oblivion I start up a conversation with the man laying on his towel next to me. To be honest we caught each other staring at one of those cuter, tanner, taller, whiter toothed guys. We laughed about it and then most randomly over the next five minutes discovered we have more in common than we don't and in a few short minutes I felt so much a part of, rather than separate from. I will probably never see this man again but for those brief moments we shared with each other about each other and any feelings of separateness I may have been feeling just vanished.I think I love the people watching most of all when I'm away. Watching them go about their lives, some frantically, some at a snails pace. Wondering what their conversations are about, amused at watching them laugh, cry, eat, carry on. Watching people sitting by themselves, wondering if they are just alone or lonely. Remembering throughout my own crazy life how many times I was healed in that flicker of a moment just because someone listened to me.As I see a man in front of me now holding his towel and looking lost and alone I'm wondering if it's now my turn to go up to him and say hello?I think I will.......jf