Like most people, as I was growing up my circle of acquaintances, friends and contacts grew and grew.

From just playing with the immediate neighbors and cousins, I went to a small Catholic school in our village with a class of twenty-or-so children. From that small elementary/middle school, I went to the public high school in our area where suddenly I had more than 300 classmates, not to mention inadvertently meeting loads of other people through various activities. After high school, I went to a small-ish college in the Catskills where I not only had over 1000 classmates, was living in a co-ed dorm filled with hundreds of my peers but was partying/meeting/working with locals and students at other institutions in the area, LIVING, in short, adding hundreds of other people to my circle.

After a couple of years of that, I jumped into one of the biggest circles I could have imagined: New York City. I transferred to a university that had so many students it became irrelevant. I lived off-campus, in my first apartment, in a building full of people that, despite proximity, would never enter my circle at all. I always had a full-time job in the day and at least one part-time job on the weekends and/or at night. I was curious about absolutely everything so I was all over town: from museums, concerts and shows to joining various activist groups, volunteering at homeless children’s shelters and soup kitchens and dancing till dawn as often as I could. I was a temp whenever I got sick of one job or another and worked in so many different types of companies that I can’t even remember them all: stock brokerages, publishing firms, fashion houses, record companies, real estate megaliths, accounting monoliths. I did manage to stay away from lawyers, at least during office hours (cocktail hour was a different, quirky kind of circle all its own.) City life. One massive circle.

Then I got sick of it all and realized the world was my oyster; or rather, my circle. I journeyed around the continental U.S. for a year. The next step, after saving money and selling just about everything I owned (excepting treasured books, music and old letters that weren’t worth a penny to anyone but me…) I began what was meant to be a journey around the world for five years.

I am still on that journey … nearly twelve years later, and I’ve only managed to explore some bits of Europe, Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands (which are, technically, part of Africa, but … it looks much better, I reckon, to list it separately… humor me, folks.) The speediness of my travel is a yet another topic altogether…

Needless to say, however, I have got one very large and highly populated circle of humans around me now (in a more meta-physical, non-geographical kind of way.) Its members: uncountable.

[Continued in the next blog... ]