What Am I Doing Here? 52 Weeks of Wandering and Wondering in 2012

He was 40 years old, living in a Moroccan medina with a wife he could barely communicate with and a baby daughter who was learning to walk. He had no pension plan, no fixed income, and no intention of stopping.

Every week in 2012, CD Damitio wrote a column asking the same question: What am I doing here? Not as a crisis — as an honest audit. He was in Sefrou, then Istanbul, then Cappadocia, then the Greek islands, then Cairo, then Bologna, then London. He was building a travel media company that might not work. He was watching his daughter take her first steps in a country that wasn’t his.

The 52 essays collected here are the record of a year lived in motion — not as an adventure story, but as something stranger and more useful: a man trying to figure out whether the life he’d built made any sense.

Covers Morocco, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, England, Malta, and Egypt. Covers Ramadan from the inside, 9/11 from eleven years out, the pyramids at dawn on horseback, and a champagne hot-air balloon ride over Cappadocia for a second wedding anniversary.

A philosophical journal from the Mediterranean in the year the author turned 40 — honest, funny, and written by someone who had given up a conventional life so thoroughly that he occasionally had to remind himself why.