i keep bumping into signs offering an alternative to having to choose between two.

sea and mountains!

golf and girls!

I haven't made any choices during this trip, and it's been so liberating.

Or at least choices that feel like cancelling something out, or opting out of something. It's a fine balance.

I used to suffer from fomo, and maybe I still do. But I think I've managed to get rid of the percentage of regret that comes with making a choice. It's now very small, though still there (only human), very very small.

sea and mountains.

I started this trip from the coast of the east china sea, on the shores of Yakushima. Already on the island, I climbed up to ecosystems that I was experience later in Hokkaido, though in wintertime. Yakushima mountains have a constant Hokkaido spring, summer and autumn.

I ended my trip on the slopes of Mt. Asahidake, the tallest volcano on the north island.

I saw a lot of golf courses. Some of them in people's front yards and parking lots.

I met really cool people, like this taiwanese hiker who had made the ascent of Asahidake on snow-shoes and stayed in the same dorm as me. We later met up in Sapporo and had a big dinner together.

I didn't make any choices, but I was always somewhere partly by choice, partly I didn't know why I was there. I received recommendations from people I met on my trip, I had hunches that I'd like to be in this and that environment. I didn't know anything for sure.

Even now with this trip behind me, I'm still working out the details. What happened and where. Why was I there, why did that happen there? Why did I forget my water bottle on that bus-stop? So that I could go back and pick it up? Did I mean to go back, or was I led on by a materialist or even parental instinct that wants to keep the pack together? Hat, towel, waterbottle and me.

This is the beauty of traveling for me.

It never ends, if you go back and reflect on what happened. Somethings are understood only with hindsight. Perhaps you suddenly get reminded of something that happened on your trip years ago? Perhaps you then realise that you hadn't given that art of the trip any thought since the trip, and you are only now creating that memory actively.

Meeting this taiwanese hiker brought back memories from my first and only trip to Asia before coming to Japan now. I remembered a song that the indigenous Attaya kids sang to us in their school courtyard in Ulay. I remembered the smell of my hosts deodorant. A lot of things I had perhaps not even actively experienced or thought about even when I was in Taiwan.

How to nurture the capacity to remember past experiences? Just as one nurtures the capacity to forget.

I'm very tired now. A bit ill, but getting better. I'm very much looking forward to going home.

Happy: it's been an incredible trip.

Dreading: the pile of books, papers, scores to go through immediately after arriving tomorrow.

I love my work.

During this trip I've been nurturing the 'love' part of it.

Perhaps some day I'll learn to nurture the other.

Perhaps they are one and the same thing.

Hmu, folks. I'm back in town!