My love-hate relationship with travel

A few notes from the road

Image: Jefferson Sees on Unsplash

Hello again. I’ve just landed back in the southern hemisphere, in time for spring equinox, after a little break that involved an entire circuit of the globe and a whirlwind trip to Europe. Thanks for bearing with me while I took a rest from writing to be fully present in the journey. Today, the jetlag haze is lifting just enough to put pen to paper once again (OK, fingers to keyboard, but it doesn’t have quite the same ring).

I have a love-hate relationship with travel, especially the long-haul type, but as an immigrant living on the opposite side of the world from my roots, it’s become an unavoidable part of life.

In my younger years, travel used to feel like an epic adventure where anything could happen. I imagined meeting exotic strangers on aeroplanes, falling in love with faraway lands, and letting life lead me to unexpected destinations – that’s how I ended up accidentally living all the way over here on a little island in the furthest corner of the Pacific.

As I’ve grown into mid-life, travel has started to feel like a stressful burden, disconnecting me from the routines that keep me healthy and well, torturing me with time zones and sleep deprivation, and throwing me into unknown situations. The idea that anything could happen has begun to feel more like a threat than a promise.

In some ways the Covid years were a welcome relief. New Zealand locked down its borders hard, and for 3 full years I had a valid reason to avoid long-haul travel (though of course at the time it felt quite punishing to be severed from family and roots). Now the borders have re-opened, travel feels like a non-negotiable shadow side of immigrant life once again.

As I planned my recent trip - a whirlwind of family, friends, in-laws, holiday and study, including 7 planes, 2 boats and more buses, trains and taxis than I can count - I noticed an impending sense of dread creeping in. Dread of living out of a suitcase and sleeping in strange places, dread of letting go of the comforting familiarity of my routines, dread of too many demands on my time, too much over-activation of my nervous system.

As I talked to others, I discovered I was not alone in this. One friend confided she had been organising her home prior to a recent long-haul trip as though she was going to die. I realised I was doing the same.

Our nervous system is a very primitive animal. It only really knows safety or threat, and it behaves as though all threat is a threat to our very existence.

Knowing how much of a toll stress takes on the body – in my case ramping up symptoms of auto-immunity and upsetting the delicate apple cart of perimenopause - I decided I needed a shift of perspective.

Here are some of the ideas I’ve been playing with during this trip….

What if home is not a physical place as much as something you carry within you? What if home can be a space inside your own body? A space where you can feel centred, connected, grounded? What if home is in fact the very ground beneath your feet? And can be accessed anywhere, in any moment?

And what if we could operate from a place of trust? Not the naïve kind of trust that nothing bad will happen, but a wise trust in our capacity to handle whatever life throws in our path. I reflected on things that had happened on previous travels including gastro bugs, missed flights and my partner’s emergency surgery for a fractured shoulder. As confronting as these moments were, I navigated them all, just like I would if they happened to me at home.

Another friend confided about having a serious medical event and requiring hospitalisation in India. Although she was ostensibly alone, she described how she was taken care of, how total strangers appeared out of nowhere to support her, how somehow all her needs were met.

What if we could trust in that?

I’ve been trying it on for size.

I’ve also been trying on treating all the lengthy journey times – trains, planes, boats, transits – the moments of being stationary with nothing to do, nothing to engage with but my own thoughts – as precious liminal space, as self-care time. Time to practice deep breathing, yoga nidra, meditation. Time to take stock, to daydream, to snooze. Time to regulate my nervous system. Time for me, where I can exist in a little bubble, drink cups of tea and just be – which is, in fact, one of my favourite pastimes in life.

And what I notice when I do this, is that I start to fall a little bit in love with travel all over again. With the power it has to shake me out of the safety and security of my mid-life slumber, to introduce me to excitement, adventure and possibility once again. With the way it wakes up my sense of beauty and awe and wonder. The way it introduces me to different parts of myself that have been in hiding and I get to experience myself with a freshness and a vibrancy that reminds me of the younger me. The way it deepens my curiosity about people, cultures and the world around me and offers me different perspectives on the place I call home. With the fantasies it stirs up of parallel lives I could be living in far-flung exotic places. The conversations with strangers and insights into their lives that I rarely engage in when I’m out and about in my home town. People I’ll never see again, but for a brief moment in time share a fleeting intimacy with – like the Greek taxi driver who tells me about his first love and how she rejected him.

I realise that travel is an immense privilege, which is not available to many, and which comes at a cost to our beautiful planet. I try not to take any of that for granted and to stay connected to gratitude for the opportunities life brings.

I’m home now. Simultaneously filled up and emptied out. Much to process and digest from along the road. And much more to say on the subject of immigrant life, which I’ll share another day. In the meantime, I’m contemplating how to stay connected to these parts of myself that have reawakened, and weave the threads of these awakenings into my daily life.

And I’m waking at 3am, while my body struggles with day becoming night and night becoming day. So do drop me a line if you happen to know any miracle cures for jetlag….

Moments of awe, beauty and delight in Greece

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