October 29, 2007
I've spent the last two weeks being variously mopey, depressed, lethargic and cranky. I'm just no fun when I'm sick. Having waded through the body aches and fever, I now just have a nasty cough, but it's starting to get better, too.
What's marginally more interesting is how I've been dealing with it. I spent some time not liking India and wanting to go home. But I can't quite figure out why, which just makes me more depressed. And wow, is that a problem. So I've been trying to figure out why, when enjoying a year-long trip around the world, I have any excuse to be depressed, but I can't come up with anything definite. Certainly, it's no fun to be sick on the road: sometimes I would just love to be home, lolling in bed reading.
Or it could be that I'm travel weary. While we love traveling, six months is a really long time to be out. And we have six more to go. Then there's the fact that we don't have a home: we are officially homeless! Which is fine, most of the time, but the constant movement associated with travel, even when traveling as slowly as we do, is wearisome. Every day is a series of decisions about where, when and what to eat, but even if we really like the food, it's not as though we can just go "home" and make whatever we want: we're at the mercy of the local eating establishments and that's not always fun.
Along the lines of not being able to cook are the lifestyle changes that we're forced into while traveling. I haven't done yoga in months (I'm picky about my practice space); we haven't been running since Italy (believe me, India is not set up for runners--it's too dirty and polluted), and while I'm a big fan of Indian food, most of it is deep-fried, bad for my health and much worse for David's.
And then there's India itself. People are pretty nice here, something I thought was of paramount importance after China, but it turns out the physical environment is really important to me, too. Did you know India has over 1 billion people? Yeah, 1,000,000,000 people. So most of India is urban, even in the rural areas. There's not a lot of green around and who knew, but that has a serious effect on my mental well-being. Plus, there's the pollution, both on the ground and in the air.
At any rate, whether it's one of those things, or some combination, I have not been happy, lately. Which I realize sounds silly, but there you go. In an effort to make things better, we're changing how we're traveling: we're heading off to an ashram to force us to do yoga; Uma told us about idly, a rice-based breakfast that isn't deep-fried; and I feel almost all better. Now I just have to stop myself from being mopey.
