I’ve been experiencing an existential crisis ever since I left New York. It’s only been a few days on the road, but I often find myself wondering, aloud, “What am I doing here?” To date, the hardest thing for me to stomach has been leisure time. Although I graduated two weeks ago, I’m not on pleasure trip. If anything, I consider this a hybrid “workation,” where I am chipping away at a task while simultaneously exploring a new city. Inactivity feels like failure and sitting still is terrifying.
There are ways in which such a reaction is to be expected; there is no road map for what I have set out to accomplish, and those whose journeys inspired me, had to wrestle with their own doubts either publicly or privately. With meetings and interviews with founders set for early next week, I’m starting to hammer away at my objective, but I can’t shake the feeling there is more I could be doing.
For whatever reason, I accomplish the most when I’m not at my computer. After last night’s rousing introduction to Paulista pub culture, I went with Joao to meet Roberto and Bruno at their house near Villa Madalena. Bruno, who is Debby’s nephew, and my age, is a musician who recently returned from a master course in Barcelona. When I arrived at the house, Bruno was out buying guitar strings, so Roberto and I watched the Roland Garros French Open and talked about sports. Soon Bruno came back and we ate the most delicious beans I’ve ever tasted, followed vine-ripened figs no American unknown to the American palette.
After lunch Bruno and I took the Metro to the Pinacoteca, where we visited the Museum of the Portuguese language. While the idea of creating a museum to honor the language of a colonizing power seems odd, the facility itslef was an homage to the dexterity and richness of Portuguese spoken by Brazilians themselves. The bedrock of Brazilian Portuguese is the European mother tongue, but its influences include other continental languages such as France as well as languages spoken by slaves kidnapped from Angola and Africa’s Southwest coast. The motivation and execution of the museum were brilliant and it’s the third museum I’ve visited where I feel I must go back.
We headed back to Jardins at the height of rush and I’m inlcuding this short video because I can’t remember the last time I saw a train station this crowded. It’s very possible that more people pass through Grand Central Station during peak times, but the flow of bodies in Luz station was tremedous. At the same time, however, even a full subway car was not that full and if we missed a connecting train, the next one arrived no more than three minutes later.
Back at the ranch, several of the emails I had been waiting for arrived. In just a few minutes I was was able to set up interviews for next week when I get back from Rio de Janeiro on Monday. Today was also special because I celebrated Shabbat for the first time in months, or years. While it seems that things are moving along quickly enough here, it’s easy to lose sight of how incremental actions will lead up to a big finish when this trip is over.
It’s approaching 3:30, which would normally be early, but part of me wants to be on a bus to Rio that leaves at before 9 am. It might happen, but I’m already feeling warn down from sleepless nights, hurried days, schizophrenic winter weather and air pollution. If you have any suggestions on how to stay healthy, I would love it if you drop some comments below. I was told that commenting was non-functional, so if this is the case, you might have to email me so I can take the appropriate action. Perhaps I will even cut myself a little slack and cease the crisising for now.
These two moguls in the making were at ![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=779d03fa-fcf0-414f-b02c-e291addcdc7e)
