Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

– Mark Twain

“After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that [1] all religions are true; [2] all religions have some error in them; [3] all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives. My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible.

“I believe in the fundamental Truth of all great religions of the world. I believe they are all God given and I believe they were necessary for the people to whom these religions were revealed. And I believe that if only we could all of us read the scriptures of the different faiths from the standpoint of the followers of these faiths, we should find that they were at the bottom all one and were all helpful to one another.

– M. K. Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi as told in his own words, Paris, UNESCO 1958, p 60.

This is so close to my own evolved beliefs regarding religion that I got chills when I read it…

I’ve moved a fair bit in my short life.  When I was younger my Dad’s job required our whole family to uproot itself once or twice every few years; I can safely say I have criss-crossed Australia more times than I care to count.  I’ve lived in the picturesque Adelaide Hills (place of my birth) on two separate occasions, as well as in suburban Adelaide, a rural mining district, a remote farming and fishing town near the Nullarbor Plain, a suburb of sultry Darwin, a drought-stricken suburb of Brisbane, and now in my present home, in the leafy western suburbs of good ol’ Bris-Vegas.  At one point my family were supposed to move to Papua New Guinea - I have the TB vaccination scar to prove it - though it never eventuated.

For one reason or another I always took moving for granted.  We first moved when I was two years old, so I imagine the whole notion of packing up a life in boxes and shipping it across the country is somewhat ingrained in my psyche.  It wasn’t until recently, having FINALLY been given my British Study Visa, that I started to realize just how much paperwork and faffing about a big move requires.  My Mum told me that she used to keep a list in her diary of things she had to sort out prior to moving, and she used to go over this list every time Dad came home with the announcement that we were starting a new adventure.  It’s prompted me to come up with my own check-list, geared more to a big international move:

• Check visa requirements and apply if necessary.  If it’s the British Consulate you’re applying to, prepare yourself to wait in near-suicidal depression for months on end whilst they give you increasingly conflicting information about the status of your application.
• Check passport is up to date and will not expire while you’re abroad.  If, like me, you originally thought you would only be going overseas once (maybe twice) and you only got a passport with a small number of pages in it, I urge you to reconsider and invest in a larger one.  You never know when you’re going to meet a mildly frustrating but annoyingly good-looking Welsh guy at a funeral and decide that you actually need to spend half your time in the United Kingdom.
• Check you are properly vaccinated and your medical records are up to date.  Edinburgh University seems to have a pessimistic side when it comes to student health - the note I received in the mail from them the other day was in 26pt black underline and read, ‘WE STRONGLY URGE THAT YOU HAVE THE MENINGITIS C VACCINATION PRIOR TO STARTING YOUR STUDIES‘.  Whilst Meningitis C is not a compulsory vaccination for entry into the UK, I’m not risking the wrath of the bold underline. Read the rest of this entry »