As I sleep in the upper berth on the twenty hour train ride to Jaisalmer, I wake to a massive cacophony of English language wasted energy.  Two English women, a mother and daughter team, are trying to fit three massive bags into the smallish compartment area while shouting and complaining at each other at high volume.  The lane into the train is blocked for minutes while the beds are critiqued, flea spray is sprayed everywhere, including onto all the other passengers, lights are switched on and bags are shoved around.  Eventually they decide they don’t want the blankets on their berths, so they shove them onto the upper berth.  The mom continues to try to push them up, seeming not to understand what the strange person shaped lump is that is blocking them from balancing.  Finally I grab them with one arm and say “I’ll hold them til you get settled.”  She says “Oh.  I didn’t know you were there” and goes back to bustling and disturbing everyone.  I think it’s evidence that some people get a little out of their element when they travel.  They should have stuck to airplanes.

Jaisalmer is a dusty city clustered around a massive fort rising out of the desert.  Once a major stop on the land spice route, it has a remote, frontier city feel to it that attracted me to it.  Of course, as one of the major tourist stops in Rajasthan, it’s also a snake’s den of touts and hustlers of useless goods.

As I walk through the narrow streets inside the fort, which are packed with restaurants, hotels and shops, I decide to grab a bottled water.  I order the cheap one, ten rupees, and hear an American voice behind me say “Don’t get that one.  It tastes awful.”  Thinking that all water is the same, I shrug at him and his wife as they walk along.  Then I take a sip and almost choke.  I run after the good samaritan.  We must become friends.

We wander around the fort for a while, then agree to meet up over dinner.  During dinner, his wife crushes any false hopes I might have had of someday getting my shit together and becoming a writer.  She has written two books, both unpublished.  She was an English major in college and has always been passionate about creating fiction.  I’ve heard this tale before, but her story had quite an effect on me.  Over the past seven years, she’s shopped her first manuscript around, edited, re-edited, edited for particular publishers, changed substantial parts of the novel, taken courses in fiction writing, read books, worked with other writers, etc., .etc.  To me, this was the story of a person with passion and talent being faced with the reality of writing as work, like any other kind of work.  I have no way of knowing if the book she wrote was any good, but in the end, it didn’t matter because the reality is that if I wanted to be an author, I would need to work at it, like every other author out there, most of whom are unpublished.

I’ve never worked at writing.  Some people say I might be good at it, but like so many other things in the world that seem to be about talent, writing is something that I think is more about work, practice, commitment.  I’ve learned the same thing from semi-professional photographers, artists and journalists that I’ve talked to as I travel.  Travelers tend to want to find another means of earning money than living in a cubicle for eight hours a day, so you meet a lot of aspirers: people who aspire to work in something free and creative.  Most of the ones who are successful seem to say the same thing: Talent is great, but it only comes into play once you’ve put in the work.  If you’ve worked hard for a long time and been committed to learning and perfecting a craft, then once that’s all there, if you happen to be innately talented at it to begin with, you might actually be able to get paid to do it, assuming you get very lucky.

I think this is the unfortunate state of things for the jobs that everyone wants to do.  I think we believe that only the rare few make it because only the rare few are talented enough.  But I know plenty of people who are amazingly talented at art, music, writing and acting.  It just comes easy to them.  Most of them aren’t doing their craft.  They ask questions like: Am I talented ENOUGH?  But it’s the rare person who just does it with complete commitment regardless.  Those people are often just talented enough that given all their hard work, they do make it.

Some of this is in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers which I finished a while back.  One of the interesting things about Gladwell is that he writes a lot of books about things that are common sense.  This is common sense.  But still, we often don’t act in accordance with what we know to be true.  I’m 29.  I’m still looking for the innate talents I can harness to maybe find a freer and more fulfilling life’s work.  But what I should really be doing is asking myself:  What have I been doing all my life that I have enough time invested to be good at?  Am I talented enough at that and is it fulfilling enough?  Am I willing to spend a good five years broke and failing at something to try to build a new core skill?

The other part of my stay in Jaisalmer was taken up by a camel safari.  It was a good time but it was also a literal pain in my ass.  My camel was an asshole.  He was young and wasn’t happy with the fact that people were going to ride him through the desert for the rest of his life.  He would randomly start walking sideways sometimes in an attempt to make me fall off.

Our group was me, two Dutch guys, an English bloke and three German girls.  Most of the actual riding was pretty uneventful except for the part where one of the Dutch guys jumped off his camel suddenly and then threw up on it.  We thought it was camel sickness like motion sickness, but it turned out he had food poisoning.  I would estimate that one in seven foreign tourists in India has food poisoning at any point in time, so it only made sense.  I give him major props.  He got back up on the camel and kept riding, only stopping to puke.  That was commitment and a toughness I wouldn’t expect from a man whose country by all rights belongs underwater.

The best part of the safari was sleeping out under the stars.  We made a massive fire and sat around it, doing dumb stuff like playing Yahtzee.  I haven’t played Yahtzee since I was maybe seven years old, but everyone was full into it.  Later we all lay out these comfortable beddings and everyone lay and stared at the stars for a while.  The stars were incredible because there was so little light around in the desert.  I could see every bit of the edges of the milky way perfectly defined and so many stars it would have been impossible to count them.  Laying there, I put on my headphones and listened to some music and thought how incredible some of the simplest things in the world can be.

In the morning, I woke up and watched as a huge scarab pushed his ball of dung across the desert.  As I watched him, I could only imagine his inner monologue: “I wanted to be a goddamn rock star.  Now here I am pushing my ball of dung around this desert just like my father did.  Life is such a disappointment.”  Maybe I’ll never be an author, but maybe I should just suck it up.  At least I’m not rolling a ball of shit around the desert.