2018 Happy Last Year :Hero's Journey Redux
The Hero’s Journey Redux
The first journey teaches you how to leave. The next one asks whether all that movement has changed the person who keeps arriving.
Unconventional but consistent: we travel the world.
The hero returned to the road before he had finished returning to himself.
A Hero’s Journey is not a single triumphant circle. It is a tide. You leave, are tested, return with something useful—and discover that the next crossing has already begun.
By 2018 I was no reluctant novice waiting for permission. I knew airports, gangways, hotel rooms, ports, currencies and the peculiar intimacy of watching a coastline disappear. Travel had become competence. That was precisely the problem. When the extraordinary becomes routine, motion can become camouflage. The year’s deeper task was not to see more of the world. It was to determine whether repeated departure still produced transformation.
The Call Returns
January 2018
The year did not begin with a call to adventure. By then, adventure was the ordinary world. Queen Mary 2 entered Cape Town like a moving city, while Stellenbosch and Fish Hoek offered slower measures of value. Then came London, Eastbourne and West Sussex—the familiar shore after the southern passage. The first lesson of the redux was unsettling: experience does not exempt the traveler from beginning again.
Cape Town, South Africa
A great liner enters beneath Table Mountain. Arrival becomes ceremony, but the mountain remains unimpressed.
Open original logStellenbosch
Vines, patience and accumulated seasons. Grapeness cannot be rushed; neither can judgment.
Open original logFish Hoek
False Bay replaces financial arithmetic with a cleaner measure of net worth: time, water and who shares the view.
Open original logLondon, UK
A city of abundance teaches the subtraction lesson again: less luggage, fewer claims, more attention.
Open original logEastbourne, UK
The downs and the sea meet at an exposed edge. A summit matters because the body climbed to it.
Open original logWest Sussex
Fields of gold after the engines—a quieter return to scale, weather and walking pace.
Open original logFebruary 2018
February crossed climates and identities with almost comic speed. Helicopters in Las Vegas, the Pacific in San Diego, my old piers in Santa Monica, then snow and old streets in Sussex. A novice fears the unknown. A professional traveler faces another danger: becoming so fluent in departure that every threshold feels routine. The call had to become personal again.
Las Vegas, Nevada
Machines built to defeat gravity gather in a city built to defeat probability. Ambition arrives with rotor wash.
Open original logSan Diego, California
The Pacific coast as decompression chamber: naval water, open sky and the old pull west.
Open original logSanta Monica, CA
My piers and the Epiphany Chair—where dreams become visible, and where they can also learn to sit still forever.
Open original logEastbourne, UK
The downs and the sea meet at an exposed edge. A summit matters because the body climbed to it.
Open original logLewes, UK
History, beer and language collide in an old town that refuses to become merely picturesque.
Open original logAcross the First Threshold
March 2018
Hong Kong was the threshold city—vertical, illuminated and built around one of the great harbors of the world. From Victoria Peak the route looked almost understandable. At water level it became current, density and departure. Sail-away supplied the irreversible moment. The ship moved. The skyline loosened its grip. The next world began.
Hong Kong - Victoria Peak
From above, chaos becomes pattern. The danger is mistaking the view for command.
Open original logHong Kong - Victoria Harbor
At water level, the city returns to ferries, wakes, engines and human scale.
Open original logHong Kong Sail Away
The decisive frame: skyline behind, open route ahead. A threshold crossed by propulsion, not intention.
Open original logHong Kong Final Views
Departure edits the city. What seemed permanent becomes light receding over the stern.
Open original logThe Road of Trials
April 2018
April was the long road of trials disguised as an itinerary. Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Langkawi gave way to Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Oman, Dubai, Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus. Every port compressed history into a few hours ashore. The danger was not getting lost. It was believing that seeing so much meant understanding it. The Suez Canal became the ordeal: a narrow engineered passage where the whole voyage had to hold its line.
Singapore
A city engineered from constraint—order, heat, vertical gardens and the confidence of systems that work.
Open original logKuala Lumpur
Looking upward in a city of towers, searching for the difference between elevation and perspective.
Open original logPenang, Malaysia
Street food, layered histories and an island identity assembled rather than inherited whole.
Open original logLangkawi, Malaysia
Tropical ease at the edge of the route—the kind of beauty that makes onward movement negotiable.
Open original logJames Bond Island
Cinema made the rock famous. Tide, limestone and time had already done the real work.
Open original logColombo, Sri Lanka
Tea, empire and port-city motion—the old trade routes still present beneath the new traffic.
Open original logCochin, India
The spice coast as evidence that globalization began long before the word did.
Open original logMuscat, Oman
Low white architecture between mountain and sea: restraint as a form of confidence.
Open original logDubai, UAE
Return to the city of audacity. The second visit asks a harder question: what survives after astonishment?
Open original logJordan - Dead Sea
Floating at the lowest exposed point on Earth, held up by water too dense to disappear into.
Open original logEgypt - Suez Canal
The ordeal at the narrows. A world voyage reduced to heading, clearance and disciplined forward motion.
Open original logCyprus
Mediterranean light after the canal—a release, but not yet a conclusion.
Open original logNha Trang, Vietnam
A coastal city where the bright water carries histories the holiday surface cannot erase.
Open original logThe Suez Canal was the year in miniature: a vast journey reduced to one disciplined line.
At sea, freedom is never the absence of constraint. It is the ability to keep the vessel moving safely through constraint. The canal allowed no philosophical wandering. There was traffic, clearance, depth, heading and the next useful action. The hero did not need another idea. He needed to hold course.
The Reward and the Return Current
May 2018
After the narrows came the apparent reward: Cadiz, Rome and the Amalfi Coast—the Mediterranean as beauty, memory and civilization displayed along the waterline. Southampton closed one loop. Indianapolis opened another at full throttle. The road back was not peaceful. It accelerated. The hero returned carrying an insight the ordinary world could easily drown out.
Indianapolis 500
After sea speed, land speed: machinery, ritual and the American faith that motion can be made measurable.
Open original logIndiana, USA
The racing capital turns velocity into community, memory and an annual act of belief.
Open original logWest Sussex
Fields of gold after the engines—a quieter return to scale, weather and walking pace.
Open original logSouthampton, UK
The gateway closes the ocean loop. Every liner arrival contains the ghost of its next departure.
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Cadiz, Spain
An old Atlantic city facing west, bright with the accumulated departures of centuries.
Open original logRome, Italy
The road back passes through a city where every new ambition must negotiate with ruins.
Open original logAmalfi Coast
Beauty arranged vertically above the sea, proof that difficult terrain can produce extravagant grace.
Open original logJune 2018
June placed three mirrors in front of the traveler. Cambridge asked what intelligence is for. Iceland reduced the world to rock, fire, ice and weather. Santa Monica offered the Epiphany Chair again: a harbor for dreamers, slackers and the intelligentsia, where insight could become a permanent residence. The question was no longer where to go. It was whether knowing would become doing.
Cambridge, UK
Centuries of intelligence concentrated in stone courtyards. The question remains: what will thought cause?
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Iceland
Fire, ice and exposed geology. The planet removes the decorative layer and shows its operating system.
Open original logSanta Monica
Back at the Pacific waiting room, where intelligence is common and committed action remains rare.
Open original logMaster of Two Worlds
July-December 2018
The second half of the year was integration. Chichester Harbor restored tidal rhythm. Greenwich made time visible. Cambridge returned as institution and idea. Bignor and Bosham placed Roman roads beneath English fields. Florida returned heat and insects; Kennedy Space Center turned action into escape velocity. By November, Mind Body Sea and The Geography of Bliss converted mileage into a doctrine: happiness is not found by circling the world. It is built by carrying the right world inside you.
Chichester Harbor, UK
Tidal creeks and working water restore the ancient schedule: leave when depth permits.
Open original logGreenwich, UK
Zero degrees longitude, where humans drew a line through the world and agreed to organize time around it.
Open original logCambridge University
A return to the academy, where ideas have prestige—but only application gives them consequence.
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Bignor & Bosham, UK
Roman floors, harbor mud and English fields place several civilizations in the same afternoon.
Open original logSouth Florida
Heat, water and insects: paradise with maintenance requirements.
Open original logKennedy Space Center
The right stuff made visible. Intelligence designed the vehicle; action lit the engines.
Open original logThe UK
Mind, body and sea brought into one frame: thought, embodiment and the element that keeps both honest.
Open original log
Global Journey
The geography of bliss turns out not to be a destination map, but a study of attention, belonging and enough.
Open original logThe quiet country was not outside the adventure.
The archive preserved this image without a corresponding journey card. That feels appropriate. Not every threshold announces itself. Some arrive as an ordinary English afternoon, after the great ports, when the traveler finally becomes still enough to notice what the voyage has changed.
What the redux changed
Knowing how to leave is not the same as knowing why the next departure matters.
A gangway crossed mechanically is transport. A threshold crossed consciously is transformation.
Cambridge can refine the thought. Kennedy Space Center proves that thought must eventually light the engines.
The Suez Canal did not diminish freedom. Its narrowness made the crossing possible.
Happiness appears less as a place than as a practiced relationship with attention, people and enough.
“Amateurs do it when they feel like it. We pros, all the time.”
The old line celebrated consistency. The year added a necessary correction: professionalism is not endless motion. It is the discipline to know when to depart, what to observe, what to carry home—and when to stop circling long enough to use it.
The reward was not the world. It was a more demanding definition of movement.
2018 crossed oceans, hemispheres and civilizations. Yet its most important distance was smaller: the distance between intelligence and action, between the view and the descent, between a life imagined and a life made visible.
The hero returned with no final answer because the journey was a redux. The cycle would open again. But this time there was a bearing: do not confuse the number of horizons crossed with the courage to choose one direction.
The world rewards action, not intelligence. Intelligence can draw the route. Action moves the vessel.