I know me, and I know how badly I do New Year’s Resolutions. I know best intentions in January quickly become failure in February, and March … well by March, it’s all forgetten … and so I’ve taken a new approach in 2026.
This year I am trying to adopt one new habit per month.
In January, I started walking over 7000 steps a day; in February I started drinking a lot more water … then March came along … and one negative thing about travel is that it scuppers habits by upending routines. I couldn’t think what to do that I would be able to sustain while spending half the month on the road.
So I decided to start meditating.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but struggle to find the patience. Thinking is such fun, why would I want to discard those thoughts and instead focus on something as boring as my breathing?
So, I decided to start with just a few minutes in the morning while I try to build the habit. I feel I am on the cusp of some kind of spiritual awakening that I cannot put my finger on, and perhaps meditating will help me edge a little closer.
This spiritual awakening is based on a number of factors, including – among other things – reading The Forty Rules of Love book on a recent trip to Istanbul (see here) and a visit to a church when I was in London. It was pouring with rain and I had 20 minutes to kill waiting for friends. I walked up from Leicester Square toward Chinatown and I spotted the door for The Church of Notre Dame de France and decided to sneak in. I am not remotely religious, but I like churches; they are often beautiful aesthetically, but more than that, they conjure up a gorgeous sense of atmospheric tranquility. I took off my woolly hat and entered the perfectly-circular main body of the building, and perched on a pew at the back – within a moment a woman started reading something (it was in French) and then broke into song. Her voice was beautiful anyway, but when others joined in I was transfixed. They must have been a proper choir because they didn’t just all belt out the same thing as congregations singing hymns tend to do, their harmonies were reheased and – to my ears at least – perfect. It was such a lovely moment.
This wasn’t a religious experience, but it was spiritual – not in a supernatural sense, but in that it was a moment of beauty and calm that refreshed my spirit, like the way meditation can if you do it properly (which I don’t).
I’ve also upped my stoic game. I mentioned in a post about a short trip to London that I described myself as a “stoic humanist” and then stumbled when asked to explain what that meant during the podcast version – so I did a bit more digging to have a better reply front of mind should anyone quiz me on it again, and this led to a greater sense of something … meaning? happiness? not sure … calm maybe? … not that I need much help keeping calm, I’m hardly a fizzing bundle of nervous energy at the best of times – if I did online dating and someone described themselves as “bubbly” I’d immediately swipe whichever way means “no,” I can think of no quality less desirable in a partner.
Undesirable traits were front and centre as I boarded the Turkish Airlines flight from Madrid to Istanbul. They were boarding rows 17 to 35, and I, in row 16, found myself in the wrong queue, so I stood to the side in a small sub-queue that had formed from others who had stepped forward too soon. These sub-queues built up, forming like eddies in a river, even here people trying to gain a tiny advantage and avoid having to step to the back of the line of those already waiting.
I didn’t worry about it. My stoic mind thinks “what should I do that I can look back on with a sense of satisfaction later?” and then try to act accordingly. In this case, I decided to watch on with mild amusement as they wrestled with the idea of respecting the queue that has already formed (the right thing to do), or feigning ignorance in the hope of getting to their uncomfortable seat several seconds sooner. I reminded myself that life is mostly a comedy, and it’s better to be amused rather than vexated when other people are a bit rubbish.
I don’t normally worry too much about the battle to get on the plane, and often hang back to be the very last person to board, but if – like today – I have a lot of hand luggage and need an overhead locker, I try to be one of the first. The last thing I want when I have a short(ish) dash across Istanbul Airport and a middle-of-the-night arrival time is to worry about my checked bag making the tight connection and then waiting for it at the luggage carousel.
There are fewer sounds sweeter in the English language than hearing “boarding complete” when you’re still occupying a whole row to yourself … and yes, there is the risk that those still shuffling down the aisle are headed my way, but in this case I survive, and for the first time in a long time am not squashed in and buffeted by the elbows of others … although the person in front is making themselves known by catapulting in and out of his seat, unaware their seat is also my TV screen, and them speedily propelling back and forth means it almost biffs into my face every few seconds. Again my stoic character is tested, and again I am up to the task. I silently move to the vacant middle seat.
I watch Clint Eastwood’s enjoyable Juror #2 and read my book: Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton.
We get to Istanbul on time, and as has become the rule, we dock at the gate furthest from my connecting flight. We arrive on A-something, my flight to Tbilisi leaves from F-something … oh well, at least I’m going to do my daily steps …
In contrast to the last flight, on this one I do not have a row to myself. I don’t even have a seat to myself as the large man to my right spills his enormous arms and splaying legs in the spaces around him – spaces occupied by me. He seems like a nice fella, and there’s not much he can do having so much volume to manage in such a tight spot. I do my best to lean into the aisle to avoid the battle for the arm rest, but the battleground isn’t there, the enemy is inside the gates and the front lines are well in my territory – at both elbow and knee levels. I need to constantly reasert my presence to avoid being bulldozered into the aisle.
I start to watch The A Team movie but get so bored I give up. I am guilty of wasting too much of my time with things that don’t matter, but this is a step too far even for me. The A Team was a favourite TV show in the eighties, for although it was absurd, implausible, predictable and formulaic, it was also fun, with stories that involved downtrodden underdogs fighting back against powerful bullies in a way that was satisfying. The film seems to have missed that bit (or maybe that came later) but IMDB awards the original George Peppard-led TV series 7.5 stars, and the 2010 Liam Neeson-led movie only 6.7 – which isn’t terrible, but anything below 7 is rarely worth the effort.
I go back to my book.
We land, and everyone reaches for their phones and suddenly there is a cacophony of doomscroll videos as everyone’s eye glaze over and they swipe at their screens. I prefer the days when people considered headphones a necessity not a luxury, but I guess the buzz of so many videos being scrolled through means one more doesn’t really make much difference, it’s just the background noise of humanity.
I can’t do that, my data plan doesn’t include Georgia, but I don’t want to do that either, that’s not how I want to live my life.
I stoically look at my watch.
It’s 1:35am, and I still need to get off the plane, negotiate passport control and then get a car to my hotel – 2am is looking ambitious for bed, but if I can be tucked up by 2:30 and get up at 9 local time, I’ll be fine …
… it’s 2:25 when I eventually get into bed, but I don’t sleep well and am woken by an annoying dog barking outside my hotel window. I get up just after 7am.
Another 1980s TV show I enjoyed was called The Adventure Game. In the show, celebrity contestants were flown to the fictional planet Arg – a planet notable for looking a lot like a TV studio – where they played a series of games to win a crystal to return to Earth. Assembling the hotel breakfast was similarly challenging, in that the various things you needed were hidden around the dining room. Cereals were on a table nowhere near the rest of the items, spoons were the other side of room, milk next to the machine that produced tepid coffee … I admit my stoic side was under pressure from my stroppy side and I sulked as I munched my muesli.
I spent the morning working and nursing a migraine, but by 2pm wanted to get some air and maybe buy a book. I searched Google Maps for “bookstore” with the map zoomed in on central Tbilisi, and it recommended I visit a women’s clothing store called Booksies in Houston, Texas, which made me wonder if AI is all it’s cracked up to be.
Tbilis sits in the valley of the Mtkvari River (also known as Kura River in Russian) that rises in Eastern Turkey, and then runs down central Georgia until it enters Azerbaijan and eventually the Caspian Sea. I feel sorry for rivers that don’t make it to the proper sea, instead emptying into a massive lake with evapouration the only route out. This is better than some, the Chirchiq in Tashkent (see here) joins the Syr Darya then barely even limps to the landlocked Aral Sea, being soaked up by irrigation as it nears its end, so I guess it could be worse.
Georgia is mostly made up of this broad valley with the Lesser Caucusus Mountains to the south creating the border with Turkey and Armenia, and the towering Greater Caucus mountains (including Europe’s highest mountain Mount Elbrus) to the north forming the border with the Russian Federation’s caucusus territories.
Those mountains are big! Their watershed is often used as the line between Euorpe and Asia, meaning anything south of the Black Sea and Greater Caucusus range are in Asia, anything north in Europe, although what is Europe and what is Asia is a bit of an artificial line – more political than geographical. Georgia, like Armenia and Azerbaijan consider themselves European if UEFA football competitions and the Eurovision Song Contest are anything to go by. If we use plate tectonics, there seems to be no border at all between Asia and Europe – the Arabian plate being the closest thing to a separate continent, but this is further south, its convergence with the Eurasian plate (the Bitlis-Sagros Collision Zone) forming the mountains in Eastern Turkey and Iran – so maybe the continental border should be moved south, admitting Georgia and its neighbours into Europe proper.
Certainly that is the cultural direction that most Georgians turn. They are a unique people with a unique language (and unique script, this is Tbilis in Georgian: თბილისი), so they don’t have any natural affinity with any other nation – perhaps, via religion, they associate more with orthodox countries like Armenia and Greece rather than Muslim neighbours like Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Anyway, I’m saying it’s in Europe because of the continent’s top ten peaks, either all ten are in the Greater Causcusus, or 8 our of 10 are, depending on your source (this was mine).
I walk out of my hotel and along the road that runs by the river – or above the road the runs by the river, it is quite hard to get to the river itself. I walk along, marvelling at the stunning cliffs on the opposite bank, houses perched on top. I take a few photos, and stare at the river, wondering if it is possible to kayak its length. I only see one boat on it during my stay, so I guess it’s not very navigable at this point.
I get to a pedestrian dead end, all ways forward involve death-defying sprints across busy traffic-filled roads, and so I retreat and use a creepy subway tunnel to get back on the other side, away from the river, and walk up to Vakhtang Gorgasali Square. I am surprised to see so many stray dogs wandering listlessly around with their right ears tagged with a yellow label. This tag means they’ve been vaccinated and speyed (or neutered) so – apart from the one who lives beneath my hotel window – they’re docile and friendly.
I see people feeding them, and I occasionally bend down to scratch one behind the ear, but they don’t seem too interested in my affectionate attentions. I’m a stranger, not part of their pack, I’m just another passing animal who might feed them or might not. Their chubby lazy contentedness suggests they’re not short of food, so I don’t suppose they’re that bothered either way by me giving them a little pet.
Later I see one sitting patiently at a pelican crossing, waiting for the lights to change, and I heard they even get on buses, although how they know which bus they’re getting or which is their stop I will never know – I guess it doesn’t matter to them, they’re just relocating from somewhere to somewhere else, food is abundant everywhere, so why worry?
I duck down a pretty side street and zigzag my way up toward Liberty Square where I had spotted a bookshop. It’s within a mall, which is a bit annoying because I don’t like malls, and it turns out to be half toy shop, half book shop, and therefore mostly for children. I sigh, this is not what I want … I want a nice indepedent shop with the gentle background hum of bibliophilia, but feeling a bit tired and annoyed, decide I might as well ask while I’m there, and am shown a few English-language titles by Georgian writers. I decide on Flight from the USSR by Dato Turashvili which turns out to be an inspired choice.
It’s a fictionalised version of a true story. In the latter years of the Soviet Union a group of young Georgians decide to escape to Turkey by hijacking a plane, a copycat crime of one that had succeeded years earlier. Their plan fails, the authorities having toughened their stance and wanting to make an example of them, kill dozens of the passengers and blame it on the hijackers, creating the case for their execution. It is especially moving in that this story coincides with the compelling love story between two of the hijackers, Gega and Tina – a story cut tragically short by the hijacking and his subsequent execution.
This quote struck me, spoken by a monk friend of the group as they discuss their hijacking plans. It resonates with this spiritual stoic thing I’m trying to get my head around:
“Humans must always make their own choices; it doesn’t matter whether they are ordained or la. You still have to choose between good and evil, light or dark, slavery or freedom …”
I find my way out the stuffy mall and into the street, and immediately find an independent book shop with the gentle background hum of bibliophilia. I sigh, walk in, browse – am amused to find Jordan Peterson’s book filed appropriately next to a book on astrology – and leave, continuing on to a record shop I’d found of Apple Maps. This involves walking up a near-vertical side street clinging to the mountainside, past the Supreme Court to someone’s house that clearly isn’t a record shop. Over the road is a café bar that might be what has been wrongly classified as a record shop on Apple Maps, but it definitely isn’t a record shop, although it looks like a nice cool alternative place to hang out – the English-speaking club on Monday evenings might have been fun, but it’s already Tuesday, so I am saved having to be this end of town so perilously close to my bedtime.
I head off to another record shop and ask the owner about Georgian bands. I’d put together a playlist on Spotify (see below), so have some ideas for bands that sound interesting, but he explains that bands there rarely release anything on physical media, it being so expensive and risky compared to digital releases. There is a clump of near-identical teenage girls looking for Radiohead albums, one is clutching a copy of Hail to the Thief on vinyl, and I nod and say “that’s a great album” and she looks confused. Her friend says, “Yes, we like Radiohead” and they shuffle away from the weird foreigner. You’d think that if buying vinyl records of nineties bands is now cool, that some reflected coolness would come my way.
It doesn’t.
I meet a friend and we walk back via a different route through the old town. She shows me the gorgeously quirky Gabriadze Theatre, a tiny (80 seats) puppet theatre created by writer and performer Rezo Gabriadze. His puppet shows became an institution in Georgia and even toured internationally – and the theatre still performs his shows, although unfortunately there are no tickets left in the few days I’m in town. I linger, admiring the building with it’s crooked clock tower, containing painted doors that open on the hour for an angel to signal the time, and a tiny clock so small I can’t even see it’s a clock.
His motto – in Latin rather than Georgian – is “Extra Cepam Nihil Cogito Nos Lacrimare” (Let tears flow only from chopping onions) and I like that … life is a zig-zaggy journey, often a difficult one, but in its sheer ridiculousness life is mostly a comedy (stray dogs taking the bus, for example) … or it should be … although Turashvili’s tragic tale (that I hadn’t read at this point) shows that too often tears flow for other reasons too, especially in countries with such complicated histories as Georgia.
We continue meandering back, via the beautiful Anchiskhati Basilica – a sixth century Orthodox church. We go in and soak up the calmness of the cavernous space, its high roof designed to amplify the singing of the congregation. It’s surprisingly small, and there are no seats, apparently people stand during services, which at least keeps things short.
We wander on down to the Meidan Bazar, a tunnel under Vakhtang Gorgasali Square back down by the river. The tunnel recreates the idea of a Silk Road market, but with more fridge magnets, and we continue down to the stream leading from the botanical gardens that runs alongside the smelly sulphur of the hot natural springs (the name Tbilisi means “place of warmth” – an epithet the dogs may agree with).
On my last day I think about getting the bus up to the airport. It involves changing buses at a stop a couple of miles away, but seems fairly straightforward … but I worry everything will be in Georgian script, and I don’t know how to pay, and – because I like to get early for flights – I worry the buses showing on Google Maps won’t really be there at the times they say and I might then be late, and I need to ask at check-in about getting an aisle seat because it’s a long way back to Madrid … I make my choice and bottle out, and lazily order a taxi. I sigh, this is a bit too easy and comfortable, too anoydyne and anonymous – apart from the hotel stray dog barking at me one last time as the taxi pulls away, this could be anywhere. I should have got the bus, I think, and remind myself that this blog isn’t going to be much cop if it’s just a middle-aged man complaining about stuff in the back of an Uber.
In The Madhouse at the End of the Earth book I am reading, the Belgica is the first first ship to winter in Antarctica below 70º south. They are locked into the ice for months, eventually having to dig their way out to avoid a second winter there, eating raw seal and penguin to avoid scurvy. Their courage is extraordinary, and First Mate Roald Amundsen and ship’s doctor Frederick Cook are particular brave with their adventuring across the ice, climbing icebergs and snow-covered mountains, risking death in crevices and cracks, all in pursuit of exploration … so me not daring to get the bus up to the airport feels a little lame.
Oh well, I get to there in good time and am pleasantly surprised to see the stray dogs live here too, lazing away the days curled up in the sun in the Terminal. The flight is busy, so although I get an aisle, it’s chock-a-block and my seat mates are not up for any kind of conversation, at least not in a language I can speak. Another short (in time, not distance) connection at Istanbul, this time having to go through security suggesting the Turks don’t trust the Georgians to do the job properly. They question my toothpaste, but otherwise I am through quickly and get to the distant gate in time, lining up to get on an overbooked flight back to Madrid … the staff trying to get people to check in their hand luggage to save on overhead locker space … I sigh, inwardly drawing on my spiritual stoic humanism, and wait …
MrJohn 