Windows

An Ode to Seven Years of Travel

I’ve looked out of countless windows at the world passing by. I remember being a kid, watching the trees, Yo-Yo Ma playing from my mom’s CD. Now, the windows are portals, holding me at bay, and at once delivering me toward new horizons. The planes, trains, and automobiles that carry me around the world, which are driven by mostly unknown humans, carry dreams, sometimes one and sometimes hundreds.

On the trains which carried me around Europe, I looked out on the flat landscapes of Spain, between Barcelona and Madrid. One memory in particular comes to me. I was standing at a station in some unknown village waiting to transfer to my next train. There was no one around. The wind blew over tan, dry flatlands. I felt alone, and utterly connected. These tracks that stretch like veins, carry thousands of human lives, I am one of them. Where are those people now?

Or the plane which carried me down to Malaysia, which I will always remember–the tumbling, verdant green hills, too green, a deep dark jungle green; the towering and pillared cumulonimbus clouds; the expansive cities. Worlds merged out that window, and I remember crying, feeling so tenderly touched by Life itself– “This is reality, my reality,” I thought.

But, also there have been those flights where I have left behind. Each journey represents a coming and a going. Even now, remembering them brings tears to my eyes, my throat tightens, and I feel grief represented. To do justice to the disparate realities, the paradoxes of approaching liminal spaces of movement and transition is a challenging task.

I remember flying out of Rio De Janeiro, manic, anxious, exhilarated, and exhausted, away from my first love and toward the looming death of my Grandpa. Or, the more recent example of leaving London, exiting another relationship as planned, but still abruptly. The grief on those flights will never leave me. And yet, they both delivered me to, well, my life.

There’s another world that exists only between places, where one is not quite here nor there. My dad might have something to say about this. We did a lot of driving together when I was child, between my parents’ houses or just into some vast forest landscape. As a child, I was always impatient, asking the classic question, prefaced by that innocent groan that only the very young can pull off: “Are we there yet?” My dad would patiently respond, “Faolan, we are never there. We are always here.” And he’s right.

But still, there’s something different about being in that in between, in movement. Even while on The Camino, even walking, there is something transitory. It’s the slowest I’ve ever moved between places, but still I was between worlds. When I stood still, I was still in transition.

My question is: What is that in-between, and do we ever actually “arrive” anywhere? If not, why is there such a strange feeling that overtakes me while on planes or trains or buses?

In Costa Rica once, I was on a many hour bus ride. I looked out at the mountains, and the rain and fog. In Laos, similarly, I was in a bus for a nine hour shuttle. Small towns passed by, and I knew there were countless lives unfolding in those towns, people I would never meet. In Ghana, I looked out of tuk tuks, which carried me past towering Baobab trees and through the aching heat of summertime sub-Saharan Africa. Who are the lives that exist in every village I haven’t had a chance to see? Who are the people? What are they like?

I’ve traveled a lot. People don’t often talk about the actual travel though. They talk about the Louvre or the beaches of Bali. And I’ve been there, and they’re wonderful. But, part of what makes travel addicting to me is that sense of nowherelessness (English is cray cray lol), that inimitable feeling of disconnecting from life through the loss of roots. There’s something inalterably wonderful about it, even while it is destabilizing. It’s a lot like psychedelics, actually.

There is a feeling of leaving behind the ordinary, the issues, the problems and questions in order to meet them anew. It offers perspective to watch the world go by from 10,000 feet above Greenland, looking below at the icebergs, washed pink in a five hour long sunset. These things change a person. They have changed me. I have lost myself in the skies and along those veins of our civilization. And, I have found myself too.

In being root-less, there is a meeting of self, without the container of family, friends, or home. There is an aloneness that is obvious, blunt, and perceptually difficult to come to terms with. But, along the journey of seven years of world travel, I have found that there is also something whole about that aloneness. I love the feeling of spreading myself out on a plane, and discerning who I am without ‘it all.’ Who am I in an absence of everything else?

Where there is stillness, there is also movement. This is one of those difficult truths that Eastern Religion so boldly faces. Where there is movement, there is also stillness. Imagine the Yin-Yang symbol. Buddhist philosophy talks about the constant emptiness and fullness that exists in every moment. There is a vacancy, an opportunity to be filled, while all at once there is a fullness and an existence. It’s quantum.

And so, while I sit here, ‘arrived,’ in stillness, looking out at El Volcan San Pedro in Guatemala, the wind blows, the water flows, and people move around me. A table fills and empties and waits. There is always movement, always stillness. Boats carry travelers and locals across the lake, some of whom will stay here until they die, some of whom are visitors only for a day or a week.

What do I make of it all? Why am I writing about this?

I suppose that many people in my life don’t understand me, don’t understand this experience of traveling the world. And I say this with total acknowledgement of the privilege I live with every day. I think, though, that I feel alone sometimes, and not in that way that is a delicious reflection of self. Sometimes I just want to say, “I love you so much, and I wish you could understand what my life is like.” So, I write to share. I write to explore my own reality, and say, “Welcome.”

There will always be another journey. Even that ultimate journey across The River Styx, that final transition. Maybe all of life, all of change, is just preparation for that final entrance into death. I suppose, every time I leave, there is a dying that happens, and every time I arrive, a new life. There is something beautiful, and exhausting about this labor of love that is traveling. I am blessed to know it, to feel it. I am honored by this life I live, and still, there are mysterious losses that follow every new adventure. Each beginning will inevitably leave behind something else. And each transition is a place to honor that continuous change.

I’m not really sure how to wrap this one up, ha!

As I read through this piece, I feel a flatness, a covering over of something. I think, as always, there is a difficulty in naming the vulnerable. If I had to try, it would go something like this. I love travel, I love moving, and I am TIRED. Each time I have packed my suitcase recently, I say to myself, “I am so sick of packing and unpacking.” And I am.

Last week, I met a fellow world-traveler, Lily, who has seen as many worlds as I have, and who is now settled in Iowa. After years of being in the most beautiful parts of the world, I wondered “Why Iowa?” And besides, the cost of living, I realized that it’s about the people, the community.

There is something I’ve needed from the aloneness of being a “tumbleweed,” as my grandma lovingly calls me. I’ve needed the disconnection to learn who I am. I’ve needed to see the multiplicities of culture to learn there is no one way of existing “rightly.” I’ve needed this, the inspiration and the million-mirror reflections from fellow travelers and new places. I’ve needed to see myself, meet myself in the world.

And now, years later, I feel done. When I met Lily, she asked me, “How does the word stability feel in your body?”

I paused, took a deep breath, and felt myself–interoception, as it’s called. I felt myself energetically lean back, as if being caught by the word, by the idea, by the feeling of stability. I felt that it would be okay to fall into the loving arms of stability. I told her, “Honestly, it feels amazing, welcoming, warm. I feel ready.”

Years ago, months ago even, that word terrified me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because when I was a kid, I moved a lot. Maybe because I’ve never had one stable home. Maybe because there’s always been an unprocessed grief in me that I’ve been running from. With stillness, there is an unavoidable introduction to what is most real and true in a person. Maybe I haven’t been ready for that.

But, as I’ve processed a lot of my generational grief in the last months, the door to commitment has swung wider and wider. Where before commitment and roots were things to avoid at all costs, now they feel like the lifeblood from which I can source a future. Where before, travel, movement, that in-between felt like home, now there is a new home on the horizon, one where books can stay on shelves, and suitcases go in the closet. There is a new feeling on the horizon, one of small movements instead of leaps around the world.

So, I write, not only to share with you, but also to share with myself. Things are changing. I am changing. I’m growing up. We all are. Will we ever arrive to “grown up” though? I’m not sure. Maybe that grown up feeling is reserved for the ancient trees or the mountains. My oldest clients are still growing up. The feeling changes, but the continuous transition remains.

So, I look out the window, and I see truth, I see a melding of worlds, I see connection and polarity. I see it all from the window. Now, what would life be like to step through that window and live in the world, to arrive, to meet myself in a form of settling, rather than fleeing. Perhaps, that is what the world is demanding I ask myself today in these words.

Clouds move perceptively across the sky. I sit. A boat passes. I watch. Life unfolds. I am here. Maybe to arrive is just a choice. Maybe it’s just a choice.