A Man without a Country

Alan by no means appears the strapping type who would cross continents and traverse oceans in an eight year drive to meet the peoples of the world. He approaches instead the diminutive. We sit across from one another in couch chairs one afternoon last week talking under the bamboo roof of the guest commons at Hostal Rosario del Villa in Cuenca. He laughs easily and looks about 42 years old, wears a worn baseball cap and appears altogether nondescript, perhaps even somewhat undernourished.


Istanbul, Turkey

Alan’s assured cadence and deep voice tell a different story. Those reflect a personal need molded onto a framework of intense curiosity which for almost a decade has stopped at nothing to find universal commonality no matter country or culture.


Cusco, Peru

So is Alan a traveler? “I can’t really characterize myself as anything,” he says. “I can just say that I travel because that’s part of my life.”

A part of his life that’s more consequence than choice he says.
Alan had been working with computer software and hardware in the Silicon Valley high tech era, and started part time, taking personal growth courses and studies. It generated full scale change but not until Alan rammed into a dead end wall years later.


Koh Phangan, Thailand

He has always enjoyed helping people, he explains, helping people discover their hidden aspects, helping people to resolve differences, helping people to better understand their motivations.

Time after time people encouraged him. You’re so good at doing counseling, they said, you ought to practice full time. So he got out of the high tech field and without a psychology degree that is in fact what Alan did for about the next six years.

“I thought about (getting a degree) for many years” he says, “and every time I went to go something stopped me. The main thing is they weren’t actually seeing people, they were seeing statistics in general and I wanted to see people in specifics.”  

He says he did it until he got really good at it. He could figure out their focus of attention, see the things inside themselves that they wanted to change. But Alan says almost everyone wanted to change superficially, for instance, how to change to make more money or how to develop a more likeable personality.

“Is that all people really want?” thought Alan. “They were satisfied with what to me was just a beginning. It was just bread crumbs. And people were delighted with it. And I wasn’t. I needed a path, I needed to go somewhere.”

He felt frustrated doing life coaching because to use Ecuador as a metaphor, people wanted to hear about the country but only one percent ever traveled to it. No one wanted to actually go. People didn’t want a change that turns things inside out or the change that pulls the root of the self out for brave examination.

It was like people “watching the travel channel but then turning off the TV," says Alan.

Buenos Aries, Argentina

This was the dead end experience that birthed the consequence of Alan’s travels across the globe. He visited Asia, South America, the Middle East and Europe. He lived in Buenos Aries, Santiago, Spain, Istanbul and Cusco, Peru. He went to India. He began searching for a commonality among people that unites despite habits of language and culture or country and belief. He “ticked” to find what made other people tick under the clothing of their heritage and cultural upbringing.

This tick is what Alan describes as “intent.” It’s a third aspect that forms a triangle of being along with the nature and nurture aspects, our genetic and environmental aspects. No two intents can be exactly alike Alan is saying, not a one can match exactly that of another. Alan argues these intents are the stuff that make us tick.

While traveling for these many years, Alan has lost contact with his country of origin and to the extent his English has been expunged of American slang. He speaks a neutral English which German or French people can understand.  

Santiago, Spain

“I’m an American in the official sense," he says, "but I don’t see the world through the eyes of an American.”

I don’t know how Alan’s awakening took place. I don’t know if it was like the rise of a morning sun over the horizon, or whether it came as a thunder clap that dismembered the lone tree on an empty tract of land. But according to Alan it was a discovery that contradicted his almost canonical belief that inside everyone exists something which unites them to others of the same species.

…”that came as a big blow to me” he says, “…we were really not…. everybody has something that makes them tick but that’s the only thing they have in common.”

When the interview progresses to this point I’m beginning to wonder if in truth the design of an individual’s being is so unique it cannot ever unite in fundamental fashion with the being of another.

Alan’s finding overturned and undermined the very purpose of his world travels and led him to go on to write a book published last February, available on Amazon in print and digital forms entitled, “The Story between Us, Living and Relating from Being.”

Alan required anonymity to tell his story, and as the author of his book, he’s known simply as Alan S.