Travelling is a strange thing.
You learn so much about yourself – how you deal with stressful situations, what kind of person you are in different circumstances, what you enjoy, what you hate, and so on.
But the more you learn about yourself, the more you come to the realization that you actually know nothing about yourself.
Which is an unsettling and perhaps even terrifying realization — at least for me.
To imagine that after all these years of being the person that you are, you really don’t know yourself at all.
How can that be, you might ask. I don’t claim to know. I can only share with you how I feel, and it is up to you to agree or agree to disagree.
I think it might have something to do with how we are constantly changing, from day to day, even minute to minute, or second to second. Things happen, and people change.
The thing is, in the daily humdrum of things, the changes are small. Perhaps not insignificant, but small enough to go unnoticed. Small enough to disappear into the routines of life.
You wake up.
You have breakfast.
You go to work.
You kill time till lunch.
You have lunch.
You come back to the office and kill more time.
You go home.
You have dinner.
You watch TV.
You go to bed.
Day in, day out, every day, forever.
Nothing ever changes. Well, maybe it does.
You wake up late one day, and that throws off your routine.
You eat leftover pizza for breakfast and that messes you up the rest of the day.
Your boss yells at you at work,
you have a special farewell lunch for a colleague,
you get fired,
you go to a party and meet someone interesting,
you decide to read a book instead of watching TV,
you go on vacation.
Things change, but ultimately nothing ever does, and the next day, two days later, a week or two later, you’re back to your routine.
And when things become routine, you stop changing, or perhaps the change is so slow and gradual that one day, you just wake up and wonder: “When did I become this person?”
Travelling, on the other hand, removes you from routine.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is routine when you travel.
You go to sleep in one place, you wake up in another, and the next day you’re in a place you’ve never heard of until two weeks ago, having lunch with people you’ve never met before and probably won’t see ever again.
You forge many new relationships, transient but ever more so intense for their transience – the underlying sentiment being one of trying to make the most of the fleeting time you have together before it is time to pick everything up and move on.
Every connection is painfully vivid, seared into your very consciousness and revolutionizing the way you look at things, but all too soon, it is gone.
And at the end of it, you’re left with a feeling of profound aloneness. The feeling that each and every one of us inhibits a separate sphere of reality, with a separate past that existed without you, and a separate future that will exist, regardless of your existence.
And sometimes, our spheres may overlap briefly, but too soon, we drift apart, to continue our lonely existence, each in our own little bubble, completely and utterly isolated and insulated from each other.
I wrote that ten years ago and in many ways, I feel like that sentiment still exists.
10 years of traveling, 10 years of moving from place to place.
At some point, it all starts to feel incoherent and pointless.
I wonder if travel is a metaphor for life — and the biggest takeaway is that life is incoherent and pointless.
To be honest, I go back and forth between these two extremes, depending on my mood (or the weather).
And I think my perception of travel vacillates between these two extremes too.
On good days, I am eternally grateful for having crossed paths with all the incredible people I’ve had the blessed good fortune to meet on my travels.
On not-so-good days, I mope that I will never see these wonderful people again, and wonder idly how they are and what they are doing with their lives, and if they ever think about the good times we had.
On bad days, I imagine they have died and I am simply unaware that they have simply ceased to exist on this planet, in this timeline.
I know, I’m a bit odd and morbid.
But honestly, having this perspective has allowed me to cherish the moments I do have with the people still around me, the people I still have the luxury of enjoying right now.
It allows me to be so much in the present, to be “fully here” in this very moment, experiencing everything in all its myriad ways — living life in HD.
And this is something travel has made me acutely aware of.
The transience of people, of moment, of life itself.
If you never know when you might see someone ever again, would you not treat that occasion as if it were your last — making the most of it, cherishing it, relishing it?
And so every additional meeting, minute, moment becomes a blessing, a gift, a glorious event worthy of celebration — a sheer delight?
And you start living your life with the deep and profound understanding that this life is not a given, that from this moment to the next everything could change, so we must do everything in our power to treasure everything and everyone — because this, this right here, will never be again.
AH, my heart breaks.
My heart aches.
Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream's sake.
― Christina Rossetti
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I read it to the end. Yes, I think travel really wakes you up to the transience of it all, but the grind of it can wear you down after a while. I know this is a cliche, but after a lot of years traveling extensively, I started to resonate with "wherever you go, there you are." In other words, you still have to deal with you whether you're in a "boring" one-place routine or your going here to there and don't know what the next day will bring.