I booked twenty-seven nights on a cruise ship.
Not twenty-seven hours by plane –which would have been faster, cheaper in time, and easier to explain but twenty-seven nights moving slowly from Vancouver to Alaska, across the Pacific, past Japan, and finally to Seoul.
I wasn’t in a hurry anymore.
The cost was slightly more, but the intention was different. No social media. No internet. Cut off from the world –or at least that was what I imagined. A floating pause button. Time reclaimed.
I told myself I would use the days to learn Mandarin. Not for business. Not for ego. But because I want to take my girls to China one day, and the idea of being able to guide them –even imperfectly– brings me a quiet kind of joy. Planning a future for them has always grounded me, even when I wasn’t sure where I belonged myself.
The cruise wasn’t about the ports. Alaska could have been anywhere. Japan, a blur in advance. This was about duration. About giving creativity room to breathe instead of asking it to perform on command.
I need a green light to perform.
For years, I’ve gone to the Toronto Fringe Festival as an audience member. Every time, without fail, I’d sit in the dark and think: I should write something. And every year, I didn’t.
This time is different. The lottery deadline to submit a show is six weeks away. The odds of being selected are slim, but for the first time I am not waiting for the universe to open a door while I look the other way. This time, I want to open the door myself. Or at least to put my name in the lottery barrel.
These twenty-seven days were supposed to be for learning. Language. Structure. Courage. A first draft of something that had been circling me for years.
But twenty-seven days –long as they sound– move faster than you expect when you finally stop running.
By the time the ship docked, time hadn’t disappeared.
It had simply asked me a harder question.
