While I have so enjoyed girl talk with Laura and Timo, lunches, shopping, eating cake and drinking wine over the past few days, I have been secretly counting the minutes to my departure. Of course, I am anxious to see Andrew and have someone to experience travel with, but also I....just...wanted...to...move.
It got me thinking about the nature of travel. While I see travel as an invaluable experience that brings understanding, tollerance, patience and education into a persons life, I also see travel as an indulgent, and even dangerous, escape. As we travel I feel we seek to somehow escape the disquiet, dissapiontment and discontent of our lives. Perhaps its a week in Mexico to forget about work stress, or a month traveling through South America to escape capitalism, or a weekend in the mountains to escape the city, we all run from something.
The very literal word of travel, to move away from one location, be it emotional, physical or spirtual to the next.
Its no wonder that scores of North American twenty-something students spend summers running around Europe, Asia and South America as they escape the pressures of deciding just what to do with their lives, themselves and discovering how they would like to relate to the world around them. I too am guilty of seeking such escape.
I took this trip to experience Europe before heading to journalism school, to enjoy a little down time, but also to get away from a career that has in many ways recently disapionted me, to escape my fight with my yoga practice and to just fill the time and the space until I could finally, finally just start to persue what I feel I was born to do. In my final days of spending time here all of those feelings have moved back into my life, that itch to go forth and make something of myself, the desire to move away from the things that no longer fullfill me the way they once did. And at the end of the day, that disquiet and discontent all gets channeled into the feeling to move on, move forward and explore something, somewhere new.
I have always in some ways admired those who travel for months, years or decades on end. The lifestyle is something I could not handle for too long (I need a larger shoe collection than this type of lifestyle allows). But I also wonder how it is that folk like this can detach themselves from stability both physical and emotional. I think of all the relationships that blaze like shooting stars bright and brilliant, but lacking the true depth that can only result from time with another. I wonder how they can detach from the stability of having a home (and a regular washing machine) physically.
In the end, I feel that travel is a very double edged sword. Travel offers a beautiful escape with life changing and expanding experiences, but can be dangerous, addictive, and indulgent. I suppose one simply has to know the difference between the two.
