Tickets and visas and complexity oh my!!

Hoo hoo! I just talked to my travel agent last night and she has both recieved confirmation that China has granted me a double entry visa and that she's ordered me my return plane ticket. Wednesday next week I'll be in Shanghai!

This makes me think I should pack. I probably won't pack until Tuesday evening before I leave for Osaka though. I'm just like that. Why would I spend boring time packing when there're Christmas parties to go to, Christmas cards to write? No, it will be Tuesday evening, almost time to race for the bus and I'll be worrying about getting everything together.

I've got to start planning a decent framework for this trip too. It's all well and good to have one's days fly by the seat of their pants, but quite another to have nowhere to retreat to in the evening. Stressful, I believe is the appropriate term.

I haven't felt too stressed in a while, but somehow traveling brings it out in me. I think it's rather odd that although I find traveling stressful, I find myself wanting to do it more. It's as if I'm employing methods of resistance training to my mind. Push it hard, but not hard enough to tip it over the brink, just hard enough to elicite a strengthening response. Can that make one mentally and emotionally tougher though? I think I sometimes appear worldy and rugged to people who meet me and rather than getting to know the soft, crab-like interior, they look at the places I've been and the situations I purposefully put myself into and say, that dude's a rugged man. Quite possibly the beard and buzz-cut as well as the fact that I always carry my knife and wear hiking boots with my suit has something to do with it. Meh, whatever. I'm a softy and I'm by no means inclined to take risks. I hate risk, but risk breeds diversity, in whatever forms it's inclined to. Ecologies develop because creatures take risks based on their predispositions. Sometimes they work and that reinforces difference. Sometimes they don't and the things perish under what would usually be considered wretched circumstances. I think the same is somewhat true with individual's lives and cultures. Although properly speaking, there isn't the same kind of Darwinian melodrama in human circumstance. I'm no Social Darwinist, humans are stupidly adaptable creatures and they'll do whatever they need to to get by. If that means joining some esoteric cult in the backwoods of the midwest or mideast, they do that. If it means speaking American English rather than some form of British English or Mandarin, they'll do that. There's nothing inheritable about culture beyond one's exposure to it.
Whatever we're inclined to do, largely because of our lifespans, is almost entirely personal. What we seem to be responsible for, however, is our own moral, emotional and mental growth, which is, I think, why I choose to travel and inflict difference upon myself. It makes me more me, as it enables me to mould myself into the kind of views I have about diversity and life.
I think that is an important point. I view diversity as strength. I view difference as vital and complexity as beautiful. Having been initially drawn into world spanning ideas about complexity and interconnected destiny by the mythic appeal of the way the Gaia hypothesis is often portrayed, I've dug a little deeper and gone to the less new-age-fruity roots of Lovelock's ideas. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the Jesuit scientist and teacher had a host of interesting ideas regarding complexity as moving towards an omega point where we would be able to know God. His ideas weren't based on hokey bible fact mining but on rigorous empiracly based hypothesizing. Others who looked at natural history and scientifically derived evidence evolved a similar idea about complexity being the overall evolutionary trend with consequences for consciousness being that it seems to increase as complexity does. All questions about whether that means rocks are at least somewhat conscious aside, it points towards a much richer implied destiny for human kind and society. I happen to like that approach. As much as I think everything that people do is actually as natural as ants building giant warrens or orangutangs building nests for the night, I do think there is some manner of guidance involved now. We get more complex and things become further revealed. I don't think people in the modern age are expecially more or less conscious than people of any historical age, but our complexity and maybe our consciousness seems to be 'increasing'. Anyway, it appears to be very late and I'm pretty foggy inside my head right now... I'll leave all those thoughts on the table, not bothering to tidy in any way, just like in real life.