Whose got a ticket to ride....?!

I am off to Bombay tomorrow to surprise a friend! I have started spontaneously taking time off from work to hop on a plane and whisk myself off somewhere, and I make these impromptu plans in a blink of an eye! I initiated this change to my lifestyle a few years ago because in some ways I have lived my life (in relation to how I see the patterns of other's), a bit in reverse!

In my twenties and thirties I was within a self imposed discipline (which I remain eternally grateful for), which left hardly any time for "myself time" within this equation of living. To indulge in anything outside the programmed agenda I had consciously set right from my college days, would have toppled my apple cart and left me in completely chaos. My group of friends in college were brilliant because despite my strange timetable that juggled earning my own living, raising a child and being a workaholic in the studio (they were the laid back kids on the block!), we shared with and from each other so intensely, and grew to become what we felt most comfortable being. We have remained as close friends from 1976 which I think is precious.

Travel for me was only when work was the objective. When friends whizzed off to the Pushkar fair or Goa for Christmas, I was the idiot home alone, who traveled through their stories that were scribbled on postcards in fluorescent pens and decorated with doodle art to illustrate what the written word couldn't!

But then and now is different. In those days it was a necessary compulsion for me to keep my nose to the grinding stone. But like old habits you find that you carry on with certain ways of being not because they are relevant any longer, but because you know no other way and are comfortable in the circle of habit. So work, work, work became what I knew best and I found that I needed to splice in other things before I found myself in that old age wheelchair that waits around the corner for me, beckoning me closer with each passing day!

Paradoxically today my friends are less mobile through spontaneous madness, but then maybe it's my time instead of theirs! I love the whimsy of dashing off anywhere when I least expect I will travel, and perhaps the surprises lies more for me than for the other person intended to be surprised! Silly but I love it!