I leave today for Budapest, where we will stay for 4 days and travel to Vienna for another 4 days. I have been reading books and watching videos of these countries to acquaint myself. I visited Prague 2 years ago, and the coming trip will let me know more about Central and Eastern Europe. My imagination of these countries comes from the spy novels of John Le'Carre and the early Bond films with Sean Connery. But I have also watched the recent films about the Prague Spring and the earlier movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
I am reading the book by Korda about the earlier Hungarian revolution in the 1950s, a period I associated with the Kennedy, especially the 1960's after visits to Washington DC and going to the Spy Museum and the holocaust museum, where some camps are located. There are echoes of these events in my recent visits to Boston and the Kennedy Library. It feels like I am finally getting to see the places that my childhood imagination dreamed about, reading historical books on these subjects.
I compare these social upheavals with the EDSA people's revolution in 1986, where I watched firsthand and wrote a paper to get my college degree. These social movements are always led by young people who go to the streets to hanker for a better life. My college years of exploration and growing up amidst the political turmoil of the Marcos years come to my mind after the Aquino assassination. All these memories have been in my mind recently, perhaps due to coming into middle age, and that sentimentality seems more frequent.
I am starting a regular writing habit so I can start working on a memoir where I can express these stories. I start to look back on my life and also seek meaning in the remaining years of my working life. The brain reaches certain stages in a person's life, and I feel a certain slowness which seems to be expected as one comes into their 60s. So I have a strategy using tDSC devices and physical exercises to keep my mind sharp. I do get episodes of doubt and minor confusion when working on a project, where in the past, my actions were instinctive and confident.
Such is the experience of everyone who grows old, and one needs to be careful into descend into senility, so travel and reading books remain all the more important. Instead of instinctive action and thought, one must now think and follow a working process, using tools like an action register and planners. To use tools like Loop to keep notes and AI tools like NotebookNLM, Gemini, and Chat GPT. It's a godsend that these tools are starting to mature in my old age.
