Forty-Eight Years: A Berlin Reflection

In less than an hour, I will turn forty-eight.

After a six-hour train ride, I arrived in Berlin and made my way to the hotel I booked online. It looks like my change of approach is already being rewarded. This hotel, the Grand Central Berline Mitte, is costing me less for two nights than the Amsterdam hotel did for one, and it’s a great hotel with a wonderful restaurant and right across the street from the subway. It is also right on the site of the Berlin wall. Tomorrow I will do the Tiergarten, the Reichstag, and other things that interest me. My train to Prague on Wednesday can be a later one since it is only four hours, but I have to get up early on Friday to get a train to Budapest because it is a seven-hour ride. I decided to fly to Istanbul from Budapest rather than waste a full day on a train. I can be there in an hour by air, but it is something like twelve hours by train. I have great hotels in Budapest and Istanbul lined up, so my trip is pretty much planned out now. I resist, but I think it is a good idea. This isn’t Blue Highways, and I’m not rich, so a little planning helps with the money and the time. I am happy with the way things are looking and going. I forgot about the loneliness, which is exacerbated by not being able to strike up conversations with just anyone because of the language barriers, but I will try a bar tomorrow night, and see what happens there. Dinner tonight in the hotel restaurant where I treated myself to a lovely steak and a great glass of wine for my birthday.

I caught a reflection of myself in the train window a few times today and ended up smiling. I am amazed at my life. It could easily be read as a tragedy: three major relationships, all ending in failure. But frankly, I read that as a success. I loved until love ran out, and then I was released–one way or another. Now I am free and traveling Europe, going places I never thought I would see, and doing things I never imagined. Life is good. I have had good fortune professionally too and have gotten to do most everything I wanted and some things I never imagined. I find myself becoming an administrator more and more, and I learned an incredible amount this past year about that. I have good friends and family and people who love me. I am happy. I have lived. I continue to live. The choices I have made that have hurt me have also been choices to live, and therefore, I don’t regret them. I will, therefore, continue to choose life over inertia and death.

The greatest gift I have received in the past year or so is the knowledge that I can survive anything. The loss I suffered last year was the most devastating blow I could have imagined, but I made it through it. The difficulties I have had professionally this year have been the most trying in my career, but I survived and even thrived. I made it, and because I made it, I can make it through anything. That is an amazing gift for a forty-eight year old: to know that you can survive anything. It puts everything else into perspective and makes choosing life that much more vital. Life is good.