Approximate sunlight.

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed." - Joshua 10:13

"Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light." - Dylan Thomas

I watched the sun rise over the Mediterranean at 5:30 in the evening. Both of us were fighting for a few more minutes in the day.

I knew going in that this was it. My last international trip for about a year and a half; the semi-retirement of my passport. When I returned to America I would begin a job with my dream television show to work for, starting at 2 days a week and being constantly on call to work the other 5. Eschewing vacation requests and treading as lightly as possible in the hopes of parlaying this opening into a full-time position. Which meant I had to take a pass on the $360 DC to Peru deal I saw online. Say no to my friend's suggestion of Radiohead in Berlin in July. I'd been the personification of Dylan Thomas' words for three years, but for the sake of my career, of my adulthood, I finally had to acquiesce to the tedium that is responsibility.

While I was grateful to travel again, this trip to Israel was itself already a segue into domestication. Gone were the hostels and followed whims that come with total sovereignty. Israel wasn't even my choice, nowhere near the top of my list for a next destination. But this trip was instead a special request by my aging mother, who wanted one last international vacation before her chronically bad feet gave way. With my memories spent with my deceased father now finite, I recognized how precious a week's worth of new ones with my remaining parent would be later in life. But a trip with her, especially in the Middle East, meant playing it safe. And aside from some freedom in Jerusalem and a day trip into Palestine on our own, we'd been on the pre-packaged tour group itinerary for the past week. With 12 hours left in the country, most of which would be consumed by sleep, the backpacker in me was fiending for some freedom.

I saw none of Tel Aviv. 10 minutes after our tour bus arrived in the city, I had abandoned my bags and my hobbling mother with her severely swollen ankle in our hotel room. With less than an hour of muted sunlight left in the yawning day, I was determined to make it the two and a half miles down the Mediterranean coastline to the old city of Jaffa before returning in time for a final mother-son dinner. The walkway contoured along emptying beaches, most people having long given up on the shy sun. Solitary shafts of frail light extended down to the water, propping up the cloud-laden sky. Every ten feet was a potential postcard landscape that I snapped off a shot of before resuming my brisk pace down the beach. 

It was an exercise in absurdity, so characteristically me. The same person who'd been to 29 countries in 150 days, who'd been to 11 cities in 6 days on this trip, was now trying to walk 2 miles to Jaffa, see its scattered highlights and be back on my way north all in under an hour. Because on the first go-round, denial is always more comfortable than defeat. 

With the sun setting rapidly, I checked my progress on a crude map that mostly highlighted the unending major hotels along the water. I was about two-thirds of the way to Jaffa, the spire of its prominent St. Peter's Church growing visible along the water. Reason, restraint, even relaxation finally settled in as my hurried pace slowed to a stroll and came to a stop. I began simply breathing, enjoying, truly seeing what was in front of me. Which meant I paused in time to fully see the clouds' defeat as the sun emerged, higher in the sky than it had appeared for the last half hour. The remaining twenty minutes of sunlight on my trip would be clearer and stronger than any of the ten hours that had preceded it. Day was breaking over Israel, the Mediterranean, and myself. Again.

With almost year and a half until my next journey, it is as distant and abstract as the names that will comprise it. Sarajevo. Belgrade. Mostar. Piteşti. Cluj. It's impossible to know how different my life will be by then, where eighteen months of infinite variables producing variables will lead me or those close by. I don't fear change (I don't think it's conceited to say I've rolled with punches better than your average 20-something) but I'm experienced enough to respect it. Especially as I'm reaching the precise age when potential leads to either payoff or failure. The point in the day when either the clouds or the sun wins. My traveling is ending for now, but the undercurrent that has propelled it, what has left me with something deeper than Facebook albums to show for it, is still continuing. As evidenced by the words and experiences here, and future others, I'm still teaching myself how to live.

If I'd succeeded in my absurdity, Old Jaffa would have gone down as the end of my travels. Just a luck in the draw of itineraries. Instead it was a sunset, by an energy with renewed intensity. I've watched plenty of sunsets in different cities, but staring west over the Mediterranean, I felt for the first time that the sun wasn't setting, it was just progressing forward. On its way to burn brighter in the lands to the West. In New York. And I'd be catching back up with it shortly. Once I came home.