Too young to be old

You can be young, in terms of effective age, and look and feel very old. I know many of these people. People who lost interest in who they really are and in what the world has to offer. And then you can be old, and feel very young. Beside the typical crisis that many men face when they start to get old, making them acting out of fear of aging, which often ends up with a divorce from their current wife and a new girlfriend with half of their age (my father is a typical example of this), beside this case I was saying, there are also healthy people who are just so enthusiastic of what life has to offer, that they are very young in spirit despite their actual age.

Myself. I can't consider myself neither young or old. Not even middle age. I mean, as a actual age, the one corresponding to my birth certificate. In any case, it doesn't really matter to which age category I fit in, because in my mind, I am still young. I feel young. I feel as a young person wrapped up in a world made of a lot of responsibilities, till the day, which I know it will come sooner or later, I will feel saturated of them and break free. There are too many things I want to do and that I keep postponing because it is never the right moment to do them. And what if there will never be a right moment?

I dream to travel across Patagonia. I had this dream since probably at least 12 years old. I had this dream after reading books about Patagonia. About the strong wind, the wild environment, the km and km of nothing. And I always feel that it would be the right place to find some peace with myself. I need empty spaces. I think that this is one of the reasons why I love Holland so much. Holland is densely populated, and so it wouldn't probably come up to my mind as a place with many empty spaces. But there are. And they are just next door to big cities. They are just at a bike distance from crowded cities. This is what I love of living in Holland. Getting lost by bike in places with empty fields, water, birds, nothing. Anyway, I am digressing.

I can't say that I don't like here, or that I am not happy here. None of these things would be true. But it is not my place. It is not a place where I feel totally in peace. Maybe I should move again, work is not all. True. But work is what made me move in the first place and leave Italy. My work is my passion and large part of my life. But it is not enough. And the more I only focus on my work, the more I get the feeling that I am missing out a lot of things, and that I am growing old.

I miss sleeping on the beach to survey the nest of the turtles, as I did many years ago. I miss acting on instinct and do something totally unplanned. I miss the adrenalin shocks that make me feel alive. My life lately is quite flat and the people I know here are quite flat too. Nothing bad about that, they are happy with their life. I am just not. Not fully. I am not flat and I am too young, or I feel too young, to have a life that moves around work, eat, sleep, pay the bills, have dinners/lunch together. I need something more. I need the unknown and I need adrenaline, undoubtedly. How can I go from totally flat to less flat? have a bit more excitement???

Let me make clear an important point. I don't want to give up my work and start to travel around the world. That is not my call. I just wish my life was less flat.

I tried to hang out with younger people and even if I had some fun, they do look at me like the old one and we do really have little in common. When you go out with people that are 10 years younger than you, it is just weird.
First, they have a lot more time in their hands generally than I have. I have a job, which I want to continue to have and it is one of my priorities.
Second, the generation gap is difficult to ignore. Third, these people are exciting or they do exciting things as I did 10 years ago, but then they will grow older and they will be like most of the people of my age with whom I don't feel comfortable now. It is just a process.
It didn't work well for me. I just felt even more out of place.

People of my age, are either married to their work or married to someone, sometimes with kids. Thus, except in a few cases, they have very little in common with me. Plus, I have many interests which I want to keep alive and it is difficult to find someone to share them with. I don't know how to get out of this out of place situation in which I am since many years.

Yesterday, I had planned a meeting with a weird person who traveled a lot and contacted me sometime ago. I thought that we could have a nice chat, so I accepted to meet him.
He didn't show up.
I stood at the meeting point for half an hour waiting for him and he didn't show up. Great! There it went my attempt to meet someone that I thought he could have been interesting (please notice: he contacted me on couchsurf, not the other way around).

Finally, this morning I got an email from one of these younger people I know here. She just got back from a bike tour in Norway and Finland. I saw a few pictures. It looks like they had a lot of fun. It looks like something I would have enjoyed a lot. Of course, I wouldn't have taken two months off (one of the girls who just came back from the bike tour, left again for another two month tour in India.....).... but I would have loved to do something like that.

Here, I can't even manage to organize a bike tour of a few hours with someone of my age!!!!!