Chronicles Of The Return

The last few weeks have been tough. I’ve been battling a recurrent infection, one that seems to crop up once a year. It’s pretty dreadful. By the time it is in full swing I am lethargic, full of malaise and generally feeling sorry for myself. I told myself, last time it occurred, that I would go to the doctor immediately once the symptoms appeared. Due to America’s horrible health-care system I had to wait two weeks to see a specialist, which was more than enough time for the symptoms to worsen. I walked into the doctor’s office with a significant gait in my left leg. He looked at me and shook his head. “Why didn’t you come earlier,” he asked.

“Had to wait for approval from my HMO. Took a week. You were booked the next week,” I said.

The doctor looked at me kindly and said, “next time call me and I’ll prescribe you something before you come in, okay?”

He’s certainly one of the best doctors I’ve ever interacted with. He has an exceptional bedside manner, listens to everything I tell him, queries me fully, often time spending upwards of thirty minutes with me. For a doctor that’s priceless.

The prescription is for a heavy anti-biotic. The kind where you spend 10 minutes in the sun and it leaves you feeling like you’ve crossed the Taklamakan without water.

As a side note, I’ve read on several occasions that ‘Taklamakan’ means ‘goes in, doesn’t come out,’ in an ancient Chinese, or possible Tokharian dialect. Having flown over the Taklamakan several times and circumambulated its edges, I have to say that I agree.

One May when my father and I were in Dun Huang, the last great oasis before the Taklamakan, I got to thinking about Xuanzang, a 7th century Buddhist monk who sneaked his way past the T’ang guards at the Jade Gate, into the Taklamakan. He then proceeded to cross it, disproving its meaning as a toponym, but no matter. He then crossed the Tien Shan, chilled at a Buddhist monastery in Samarkand–just a few years before the Arabs irrupted into Central Asia, and then did a backwards dogleg into Afghanistan and India where he spent a decade plus collecting Buddhist manuscripts to take back to China.

Buddhism was not new to China, but it’s safe to say its roots were nothing compared to those which dug deep after Xuanzang’s return to Chang’an, the capital of the T’ang empire. What course might Chinese Buddhism taken were it not for Xuanzang’s efforts at travel, discovery and exploration? And what course might my life have taken had I not been exposed to Chan Buddhism in China in 1999?

This diminutive monk spent his remaining days translating the Buddhist corpus is a spartan monastery cell, eschewing all glory and worldly goods and his good works echo down the centuries to my own time and my own debt of gratitude to him.

Now that’s a character with character. Central Asia is littered with them, from the monstrous Timur–aka Tamerlane, who left a trail of human skulls from Damascus to India–to the poignant Omar Khayyam.

I tend to think about people like Xuanzang and Polo and ibn Battutah when I am feeling sorry for myself. Sometimes it works: I feel better, realizing my pedestrian concerns, minor ailments and the general discontent I feel with my post-modern life do get the better of me.

But sometimes it fails: I want to be Polo, or Rabban Sauma, Wilfred Thesiger, people who lived a full life so far away from home. People who made the world their home, citizens of this great and tragic blue ball spinning off into eternity.

And then I get a text message and the world comes roaring right back at me.

Osh, Kyrgyzstan: a post-apocalyptic dump filled with squalid Kruschev-era apartment blocks, febrile, mosquito-ridden air, and regrettable food.

Alone.

Two great mountain ranges encircle the town. To the north and east the Ferghana Range hovers above the city. From the south the Pamir massif pushes up, shrouding the city in a warm, orange embrace.

I need to leave.

A few days before I’d weathered a mob of people and machines crossing over the border from Uzbekistan. But the Kyrgyz side was sleepy, uneventful—not even a passport check.

Getting out, however, was proving difficult.

One escape is flying an antiquated Soviet-made turbo prop through the mountains, “not over them,” as the airport ticketing agent said. The other requires finding, haggling with and hiring a driver to take you to Bishkek through some of the most rugged, remote and beautiful mountains in the world. Weaving between glacier-filled valleys and sheer alpine cliffs in a white-knuckle inducing Volkswagen Bug with wings wasn’t my idea of fun—besides, I hate flying. So I chose the ground route.

Drivers making the trek over the mountains to Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan’s capitol) congregate in a gravel parking lot full of rusted buses across from the main bazaar. Unable to cajole a single driver into making the trip over the mountains to Bishkek—each request was dismissed with a curt, “No, it’s too far!”—I broke for lunch around noon.

Super sized Bunsen burners topped with pots of bubbling broth and languorous noodles occupied stalls lining the bazaar. Blowing gently on a steaming pile of laghmam—a Central Asian staple of thick noodles in mutton broth—a deep voice boomed behind me.

“Ishmael,” he exclaimed.

Expecting a tout, I turned and found instead a leathery-faced, handsome Uzbek wheezing, “Taxi, Bishkek.” He caught his breath and pointed at the distant spires of the Ferghana Range.

“How much,” I asked? After a cursory bout of haggling we agreed on a price.

I trudged uphill with Ishmael along a narrow, tree-lined dirt lane. Walls surrounded the homes in the Persian fashion, his no different. The gate creaked open. Laboring over a washtub his wife smiled and rushed off towards the kitchen. She beckoned me to follow. Ishmael left in search of more passengers.

An hour later Ishmael returned with three strangers. Fatima was a striking, moon faced Uzbek woman with curious eyes, traveling from Andijan to Saint Petersburg to see her brother; Ilhom, a railway worker—“what railway?” I wondered silently—was returning home from a holiday with his elderly parents; and the Wrestler, a big brute of a man with no neck and fewer words never said what it was he did. His silent, brooding demeanor discouraged me from asking.

We darted through Osh’s crowded and decaying streets and soon pushed into the Ferghana Valley, skirting the mountains always to the East. A beat-up and weary old horse stood lonely by the roadside. Mule drawn carts, heavy with peasants in colorful dresses were followed by big steel milk canisters along the roadsides, targets for bored teens with stones. To the west, behind a smiling young boy dressed in white, grain fields spread out like a blanket of saffron.

After an hour on the road Ishmael parked between a restaurant and a small brook. We sat under an old sycamore tree, filled with Indian Mynas chattering in the branches like bored housewives. Leaves rustled like coffee beans falling into a can. Somewhere a mule brayed a stubborn lament.

I nibbled on my shashlyk—lamb kebab—. Ishmael and Fatima talked about Saint Petersburg and life before the Soviet Union collapsed.

“At least I didn’t have to travel to a foreign country to visit my brother? He wasn’t a foreigner then,” she said.

“But we make our own future now,” Ishmael replied.

“What future,” blurted Ilhom?

The table grew quiet. I sucked the last bit of meat off my kebab and tossed the bones to a skinny cat lurking under the table.

We piled back into the car and drove off. Many of the villages we passed felt abandoned, dusty. Others looked bucolic, Italianesque in the slanting light of late afternoon. Poplars lined flat gravel lanes. Grapevines infiltrated trellis-covered courtyards. ‘New’ mud-brick homes replaced old, crumbling Soviet-era housing.

The road into the mountains crossed a small tributary of the Syr Darya River, the ancient Jaxartes, where several young boys swam naked in the river. Shadows crawled across the valley floor.

The Volga crested a blind hill. Shimmering in the sun below lay Lake Toktu-gol, a large hydroelectric reservoir filling the Naryn River Gorge. It’s cool, marble-green waters powering the turbines that light up the night time Ferghana.

Withering heat blasted through the windows. Ishmael wiped his brow with a handkerchief. Fatima and Ilhom shuffled in their seats while the wrestler snored. I watched the passing panoply from the window.

Sage-colored brush dotted the chili-red soil. Jagged, snowcapped peaks grew on the horizon, indifferent to the whirring of cars on the road below. The few clouds that made it over the wall of mountains disappeared before my eyes.

And then dusk arrived, deep and pink, transforming clouds into mountains and mountains into clouds. Higher and higher into the Tien Shan the old Volga climbed. The silvery surface of Toktu-gol’s water faded into the night as the heat broke.

We stopped at a roadblock: my first passport check, now deep inside Kyrgyzstan. A cherubic young officer with a Mongol face and blue eyes waved us, AK-47 in hand, out of the car into a pitiful shack. Plaster peeled from walls surrounding a desk and stool, a single bulb clung tentatively to the ceiling. A teapot stood in the corner.

“Welcome to Kyrgyzstan,” he smiled, inspecting my passport. “Some tea?” he asked, “We don’t get many Americans here.”

I shot a pleading glance at Ishmael but he shook his head. “We’re in a hurry,” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders apologetically and walked off.

We plunged into the chill Central Asian night; a full moon glimmered above morphing the blackness into dreamy shadows. The shack receded, until only a pinhead sized point of light remained a thousand feet below in the valley. High above now in the Ala-bel Pass (10,443) a parade of yurts lined the roadside. Lights waved in the keening wind, beacons of conviviality selling kumys—that toxic nomad brew of fermented mare’s milk.

“Kumys,” the Wrestler roared, stabbing a forefinger the size of a Churchill cigar at the window. Electricity surged through the car.

“I want kumys!” he said, his golden teeth reflected in the dim-light.

Ishmael ground the Volga to a halt. The Wrestler leaped out of the car, ambling off towards a yurt like a lame hippo.

I stepped out into the wind. Faint but urgent haggling came from the yurt. Moonshine ricocheted off the mountaintops, a kaleidoscope of black and white dancing nervously across the lunarscape in front of me.

“Halfway,” I whispered and the wind carried the word back from where I came: the rich cities of the Silk Road, Samarkand and Bukhara; the empty Kizil Kum, Baku’s oily Caspian shore; Tbilisi’s schizophrenic architecture; rainy Batumi and bustling Trabzon; Istanbul, the Golden Horn, the last home of the wandering Turks.

And then my thoughts turned Eastward: a night in Naryn, across the Aat Bashy Range, over the Torugart Pass; down into East Turkestan and ye old Kashgar; towards the dunes of Dun-huang and the Jade Gate; Tibet, the Potala; Kathmandu, and India, the Crown Jewel.

Ishmael touched my shoulder. “We must go,” he said in a whisper.

Conquered by the great ships of human commerce, oceans are now but highways for material goods. The skies, once reserved for the imagination, are now full of metal tubes hurled across continents in time for the late night news. Travelers now arrive in hours—at most days—to places that once were remote and unattainable. Once a luxury only the wealthy, or the extremely (fool) hardy engaged in, traveling is now a bourgeois pursuit, commoditized and indistinguishable from tourism. I’m not arrogant enough to presume that what I’ve done is any different from (or better than) those who descend upon enclaves safe from the locals, full of amenities and bereft of any but the most prosaic of challenges—the occasional bout of diarrhea notwithstanding. Far too many real travelers have come before to indulge in that kind of fantasy.

But the underlying virtues of travel—and travel writing—have not changed. Satellites may have mapped the Earth’s undiscovered country but the human heart remains shrouded, its motives unexplained, most especially my own.

Why have I undertaken these journeys?

After fifteen years, thirty-five nations and several hundred thousand miles I’m no closer to an answer than when I began. What I do know, the central truth, as it were, is the troubling knowledge that I find more acceptance and fellowship with foreigners than I do at home surrounded by family and friends. This seems to me the most important question of my own travels.

At a minimum it informs much of why I travel, that I’m more comfortable, fulfilled and content when I am on the road. The peculiar angst I call ‘modernity’ seems not to sting quite so much when I’m moving from one place to another, over a cup of tea with a well-met stranger, stranded in deep reverie or just puzzling over some architectural oddity.

Tellingly, such moments of recognition, connections across a cultural chasm most will never have the opportunity to comprehend, matter more than anything I’ve done at home. Nothing measures up. Perhaps it’s all in the connection with my fellows that I find so addictive. Suddenly I’m no longer alone.

But a profound paradox is at work here. It’s a lonely pursuit, travel.

At moments I’ve met amazing people, like Misha, a small, proud man who drove me through the Zerafshan Valley around Samarkand. A Soviet-trained engineer now relegated to driving a taxi for the occasional tourist, Misha was a warehouse of stories, jokes and anecdotes. He entertained me with humorous antics, charmed me with his wit and his prodigious knowledge of “Glorious Samarkand,” as he called it. Translating for me when my Russian failed, indefatigable in his introductions, proudly showing off his home, his glorious city.

Once in Bombay I witnessed the saddest, most tragic suffering I’d ever seen. A half-mile walkway leads out to a Muslim shrine standing in the Arabian Sea. Waves lap onto a jetty filled with the discarded dregs of humanity; a hopeless boy missing an arm and leg crawls towards me; a covered woman, burns clearly visible on her outstretched hand—begs for a single rupee. Some of them huddle in twos and threes, unable to walk, open sores oozing pus, moaning. A nightmare scene awaiting an Indian Dickens.

At other times I’ve seen works of stupendous beauty, choked up, tearful, spellbound—if only I could hold on to the moment forever, explore just how precious, how close to the heart of mankind this place is. What unifies each scene is the essential loneliness of the experience, be it tragedy or transcendence. Each is transient and none can ever be fully shared with anyone else.

But the rewards, those can never be stolen. Recalled at a moments notice they are a salve, a poultice applied to the cruel banalities of modern life. At times like these I find comfort in Ryszard Kapuscinski’s lament for the traveler: “Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the [traveler] feel like himself, at home.”

Rarified mountain air pours in the windows. The Kumys sedates Ilhom and the Wrestler. I can feel his thunderous snores even now. Fatima sleeps. I doze fitfully.

Late in the night a bump in the road jolts me awake. No longer in the mountains, the Volga speeds down a straight road lined with kiosks selling strange products at an even stranger hour: fireworks, ramen noodles, vodka, cheap Chinese electronis; all proof Central Asia remains a trader’s paradise.

We arrive at my hotel around 2:30 AM.

Fatima gazes at me in a puzzled manner and grabs my arm as I pull my backpack from the trunk.

“Where will you go next?”

“India.”

“Why?”

I shrug my shoulders and reply, “Why not?”

In late 2003 when I returned from my journey across the Silk Road, I made my first attempt to write a book. It was ultimately unsuccessful, for a number of reasons. First, I had no confidence in my writing skills. Second, my writing left a lot to be desired. Sure, sometime between 1995 and 2001 I found my voice, so to speak, but it hadn’t matured. I hadn’t grown into my own skin as a writer. To this day I still wrestle with what to reveal versus what not to. But the most difficult task was organization. I had no idea where to start. The longest attempt at writing was a 30 page grad-school paper on contemporary Russian foreign policy. Writing Russian foreign policy doesn’t lend itself to novelistic pacing, and autobiographical revelations, plus throw in historical oddities and my love of architecture? Putting something together with a hoped for 200 plus pages? Or around 75,000 words? Wow, I was intimidated.

After several fits and starts (I did manage to write a pretty good chapter on my time in Georgia and I put together a decent chapter on classical China and a fun ride over the Tien Shan in Kyrgyzstan but that’s as far as I ever got) I decided that to write about the Silk Road properly was going to require another trip and a whole lot of notes. It might even require two volumes. So I shelved the project. I will pick it up at some point in the near future—it is a project that is a labor of love and enduring fascination on my part. But that was then.

Today I’m officially three fourths complete on book attempt number two. I’ve covered most of what I hoped to in South East Asia. I gutted much of the story of my conversion to Buddhism as too self-indulgent, but surprisingly added parts of my divorce that seemed to gel with the narrative–of course this may change when the first draft is complete and an editor has her way with it. Some of the history is is really interesting, even to me still–and I wrote it. The India chapter is complete. That was a revelation. It’s equal parts autobiography and romp through the architectural traditions of the sub-Continent and the story of spices in India–mostly Kerala. And my amazing adventure in Turkey is pretty much done. No spoilers there. It’s too much fun to contemplate. The Turkey section of the book was the easiest to write for one reason: by the time I arrived in Turkey I had gotten very, very good at keeping copious notes and was journaling at least 750 words a day. Throw in several dozen long emails to friends and the source material almost got overwhelming at one point. I had to make some serious executive decisions on just what I wanted to include in the manuscript, as opposed to struggling every day with adding stuff to it, as I did with the Singapore and Malaysia portions.

When it comes to travel writing I think one key—probably the major key—is keeping copious notes and keeping them up to date. Jotting down observations is good–it’s also a potent way of creating vivid and living metaphors. Some of my best lines came from esoteric and barely legible scribbles, often times meandering across the whole page, lines written while on a bus, a camel or a train, the rocking back and forth evident in the ferocity of punctuation. But ending the day by writing up my perceptions and observations, which is something I was doing religiously by the time I arrived in Istanbul—but failed to to after I arrived in Denmark—was critical. The travel narrative, after the autobiography, is the most self centered of all writing forms. And when I lacked proper notes, the narrative suffered.

The last quarter of the book is going to be a tough task. First because I’m rejoining corporate America next week (for a short time only). And because my notes from Budapest to Amsterdam are sketchy, to say the least, the narrative has to be reconstructed via memory, which is a frail and often complicated thing. And considering the debauchery of Amsterdam? Ha! Anyway, the last quarter of the book is more about ‘the return’ than it is about travel; it’s the most ruminative and reflective portion of the book. It’s hard to maintain narrative pacing while ruminating all the time.

I may scratch it, in the end. But I’m loath to do so. As my friend Lex says, “the hardest part, after all, is the return.” He’s correct, which is why I think I can get it right. I’m confident that a chapter or two on ‘the return’ will help put all the changes that I underwent on the journey into their proper perspective. But more importantly, I think writing about ‘the return’ is critical for another reason: it answers, to a great degree why I travel.

To not include it might be like telling a story without the climax. That’s no fun. Then again, in real life, there often is no climax. Just a random series of ever befuddling events.

Such is the ennui of modernity, is it not?

I always wondered why there were flies painted in the bowls of so many urinals across the globe.

Especially the Dutch and the Danish urinals. (And yes, I realize urinals is not the greatest topic in the world.)

But I really had no idea there was so much subliminal message going on.

Gives new meaning to how dense men can be and are.

Me included.

Here are the keywords to a google search someone made this morning which led them here: hard to return to life after traveling.

I can so relate. There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not pining to be on the road somewhere. In Oman earlier this year I had a conversation with a young woman from Australia. She said, “I’m absolutely wrecked for normality now. Traveling for any length of time more than six months will do that to you.”

If you’ve got the travel bug, by all means follow it. But word to the wise: life will never be the same. And there are negative consequences to the traveling life. It’s not all fun and games.

Your parents won’t understand you. My father still schemes and manipulates to keep me in one place, to settle down, have a family and all that. Seriously, at 39 years old it ain’t likely. As soon as I can I’m getting back out on the road. My mother is much more accepting, but I think that’s just out of resignation than anything else. And while my sisters love hearing about my stories the envy is real; that I chose to go out in the world and do what I do, and they are at home, raising families, dealing with ‘real life’ as they call it.

A traveling life also truncates friendships, even those that are ‘lifelong.’ Of course, there is that glowing time when one returns home after a lengthy absence when you connect with all your old friends. And for some of them the bond does get stronger–those, however, are few and far between. For most it does not. At first they are glad to see you, but then the wide gulf separating two different lifeways is all too obvious. Text messages and invitations to go out for happy hour and such dissipate. Phone calls don’t get returned. The euphoria dies.

And searching for a ‘real job’ when you return?

Don’t make me laugh. Just the other day I was turned down for a job. The reason: “well, you’re the most qualified for the job, but you’ve been out of the job market so long–by choice and not due to a layoff–that we’re hiring someone fresher.” It is what it is, I suppose.

But, the rewards?

It’s been six months to the day since I returned. And I’m thinking at some point soon the Chronicles of the Return will need to be renamed the Chronicles of A Mistfit, in the sense of someone who just doesn’t quite fit in.

I’m not complaining, not remotely. I chose this path and I am grateful I did. I wouldn’t do anything else. Nothing in life has ever made me feel richer, more alive and in touch with the reality of our glorious home, Earth, than traveling. And I doubt anything ever will.

As the bus twists and turns up the Sierra Madre del Sur coming out of Zihuatanejo the first thing you notice are the lush green hillsides. The next thought that logically follows is: wow, there is a lot of water here. But like the coastal ranges of California the water is deceiving as I soon discovered.

After climbing above the first range of crests, outcrops and rippling ridges we descended into a broad valley, much as I imagine the Salinas Valley in John Steinbeck’s retelling. It was dry, cactuses proliferated. Grasses burned off in the heat of a Mexican summer. Corn fields baked on the banks of a river.

“Lago muy seco,” I asked the bus driver. “Si,” he replied, “it’s the lowest it’s been in twenty five years.” The scene was well nigh apocalyptic. Everyone here in Austin is concerned about the levels of Lake Travis, one of a chain of Hill Country reservoirs built for flood control (and water management) on the Colorado River during the Great Depression. LBJ’s pork for the area when he was a Congressman and Senator. But this Mexican lake? It was forty feet low. In part of the lake fields of corn had taken over–the river snaking through where water and fish once thrived. This lake provides necessary drinking and farming water for the States of Guererro and Michoacan and now it was almost empty. The landscape was parched. Sure, I was in a rain shadow. But the sources of the lake were not, as they sat at the crest of a watershed, which in most years, brings in ample water to the region.

“It’s the hottest and dryest summer I can remember,” said Resendo, the owner of a small cafe in Melaque. Melaque is on the coast. Tropical. It is supposed to rain every day in July, August and September. Not this year. And when a Mexican complains about the heat, you know it is unseasonably warm. “It’s the rainy season,” he went on. “And you’ve been here, what, almost two weeks? Has it rained?”

“Once, for half a day?” I replied.

“Exactly,” he said.

In the last year I have traveled in almost twenty foreign nations. And there were only two (Vietnam and Singapore) where the people didn’t complain in one sense or another about massively altered traditional weather patterns. I’m not talking about ‘global warming’ here. That’s a misnomer, in my opinion, for what is happening. What I’ve heard about and what I am discussing is nothing short of global climate change.

In Indonesia Lake Toba was 10 feet higher than it had ever been. “Too much rain,” said Efan, the young man who managed the guest house I stayed in.

“The Highlands are extremely dry this year,” said Les an Australian ex-pat (and bug collector) living in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. “I haven’t seen my favorite beetle this year at all. And it’s not rare. It just needs water,” he said.

In Laos and Thailand the late onset of the cool season messed up food production. And it’s almost paralyzing Cambodia.

Although the Monsoon didn’t fail in India in 2008, my farming friends in Kerala had already almost run out of water in the Western Ghats and were worried about the cardamom crop failing. “It’s not as water hungry,” said Ahmed, “as cotton, but it is a thirsty plant.”

Oman had been devastated by a hurricane the year before. Yes, a hurricane.

Turkey? Central Anatolia was greener than many people could ever remember. But spring was late in coming. And it was a cold spring. The Judas Trees blossomed a full month later than they normally do.

“We only had a week or two of snow this year,” said Stuart, my best friend in Denmark.

Yes, you read that correctly. Viking-land lacked real snow.

And here I sit in Austin, Texas. The mercury in the thermometer is at the point of bubbling and it’s only 1100am.

All this is anecdotal. Dismiss it. Or don’t.

But here’s the whole point of my anecdotes, from an interview of Jared Diamond:

“The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world,” says Diamond. “That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans.” The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.

Can’t humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? “We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops,” he says. “Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world’s fresh water. So you say, ‘Alright, we’ll get around water by desalinating sea water.’ But then there’s the energy ceiling, and so on.”

That’s the big question. The question no one is willing to voice. Am I, a member of the advanced world willing to forgo some of my standard of living for those in the developing world? And if I do so, do I have the moral and ethical standing to ask those of the developing world to forgo some of their wants?

I don’t have an answer.

I can promise you one thing: we cannot have it all. The Chinese cannot live like Americans and the Americans cannot continue to live as they are. Something will break.

One night in June, as Stuart and I sat in the garden, polishing off a bottle of tequila, he asked me how I saw the world in fifty years.

“Hotter, poorer, hungrier and more violent,” is how I put it. “But it’ll still be round,” I said, taking a swipe at Tom Friedman.

“That’s pretty grim, brother,” he said, smiling at the joke.

“If history has taught me anything, Stuart, it’s this: life can be grim and history is inexorable,” I held my finger up silencing an emergent query. I gathered my thoughts and finished up, “but humanity will muddle through.”

I don’t know if I want to bequeath a world of ‘muddling through’ to our children. But that’s what they’ll get.