Do you miss traveling?
(Hanging out on the tarmac getting ready to leave the Azores at sunset. 2020)
The most common question I have been asked this year is, “Don’t you miss traveling? Are you freaking out?”
The short answer is, no.
I initially thought this was because I happened to take two very well timed trips in February. The first to the Azores and to second to Austin, TX. The former was a vacation and latter was a family visit. While I was in Austin, things became increasingly concerning and I ended up wearing a mask during travel, something that wasn’t compulsory at the time. (I’m glad I did.)
The more I was asked the above question, the more I reflected on why I wasn’t feeling like they expected me to feel. That sounds counter intuitive, but it was not about pleasing them or negating my feelings, it was about investigating further.
I did find it odd that I don’t miss traveling, but then I realized, it isn’t too often that that happens to me regardless of the current circumstances. I mean maybe in my college years when I got back from study abroad and thought my world was imploding, or during other tricky re-entry times, but on the whole or maybe more specifically the last three or four years, I don’t miss it when I’m not doing it.
I don’t travel like other people I know, so I guess not having this feeling is no different than that. I do experience what the Welsh call Hiraeth, but that is different than missing traveling. Hiraeth is the longing for a place you have never been or a place that no longer exists or maybe never has. But even that has truly dissipated as I have found more and more places around the world that I thought fit that description, and what I found was that they always felt like a homecoming.
I digress. The notion I have come to is that I don’t “miss” traveling because what I get out of traveling I am still doing in my every day life. It may look a little different, but in the most basic sense, I am still curious and I am still exploring every day. For many years my travel was focused outwardly, collecting places, experiences and friends from around the world. But over the last four or five years, it has shifted more inwardly. I now travel as much internally as I do externally. I still follow the thread of curiosity everyday in as many ways as I can. And to me that is what I do when I am visiting a new country, city, town, village.
I want to be clear here, I do not travel inwardly for sport, distraction or to over-intellectualize. I travel inwardly because it helps me learn to be more myself and continue to strip away things, ideas, beliefs, habits etc that are not the core of me. As I get more and more comfortable with the intricacies of my own system, I find more trust in myself and my ability to be with uncertainty, which basically means being able to be with everything and nothing exactly as it is.
One of the big changes in me throughout the last few years and especially during the year that is 2020, has been looking at what I am being called to do. A part of my process is asking, what is the environment and my life asking of me? For years it was traveling at every moment that was possible and available to me. I HAD to see how many ways there are live and create a life. I needed that flexibility of mind to be forced on me by circumstances of my own creation, aka putting myself in new situations in new countries as often as possible. Sometimes I was called to counsel a friend in dire need of emotional support, sometimes it was to create new things in my life through the arts, sometimes it was to be in a relationship simply for the growth of it. And now, right now, I look at my life and see that I am being asked to be still, to be in place, and to be with my family. It’s as simple as that.
The way I can tell what is being asked of me is by paying attention. For so many years I didn’t. I resisted and pushed and pulled, trying to bend everything to my will through control, or rather the illusion of control. Now, I am able to more closely discern what is in flow, and moving and what I am resisting or pushing and pulling. There is a distinction in how it feels to me, mentally, emotionally and in my body. I watch my emotions and reactions, I sit with them, I find out what is real to me. And then I make the best decisions I can with the information I have at the time (which I think is all we can ever really do).
A key indicator for me is also when I start hearing myself saying the word “should,” a lot. I say it much less often than I used to, and now it means something else to me. It now means “pay attention.” It means something is not true. It is shows me where I feel pressure from an outside force to do something as opposed to something that I am consciously choosing, wanting and intending. That word makes me stand up and listen and then go deeper.
People asking me if I miss traveling, triggered a should, but it was a should from them. The question itself was asked as if it had a should in it, even though no one said it. It implied that I should miss traveling because it is and has been such a big part of my life. But it is only one part of me and one part of my history and my future. I am so much more than the places I have seen and experienced. This time, this year, has shown me that. It has opened doorways to explorations of other kinds. The journey I am being called to right now, is inward.
What is your life asking of you right now?
