Travel: Finding Identity in Anonymity
What is it about travel? As with all things, its absence during this time of standing still has made my heart nostalgic for the skies, the sands, and the sunsets. Some say you travel to find yourself. That is strangely poetic and most surely false. I had “found myself” over and over again and the chameleon I had become in these deep dives into “self-care” had left me..self-centered, deadened, desensitized, and dull.
Home, the structure, and the institution were a cacophony of celebrations, birthdays celebrated, triumphs shared, failures lamented, loves found, loves lost — the comings and the goings, the beginnings, and the endings. There were for me, deafening whispers of missteps, of falling short, of missing the mark, of forgetting the code that would unlock some door where satisfaction waited on the other side. “Fold me,” “fix me,” “wait for me,” “change this,” “be that”…..Lives can pass this way.
Home had been the place where people were waiting on me where I was awaiting their return. Now, voices silenced, I found there was no longer an audience for the performance that was my life.
In its place, there remained a stirring of emotion, a yearning and desire to touch some mystery out there.
What I wanted, what I had always wanted, was to be always arriving and just about to leave…the paradoxical dilemma of the traveler.
“ We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all of our pores with blood; We do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough…We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all of our wheels in motion.” Henry David Thoreau
I bought a ticket to Valencia. I welcomed the flood — I wondered if I remembered how to swim. I decided it didn’t matter; to drown in the deep waters seeking some subterranean world was better than traversing the flat surface that had been my life. The thought of anything — passion, grief, exile, the danger was welcome. Bring on the deluge of mystery-
I raised the gates, they were useless by now…. ineffective in keeping the good in and keeping the bad out — armies of confusion and loss had stormed the gates.
I set the wheels in motion, though I no longer knew how to navigate the vehicle that was my life. I had become still, stagnant. It is a universal truth that a still heart is a flatline for the imagination. Desire had ceased to exist. I was homesick for nowhere, longing for nothing, curiosity and imagination were but distant memories.
“How long the road is. But for all the time the journey has already taken, how you have needed every second of it in order to learn what the road passes by.” —
Dag Hammarskjold Markings
I bought a ticket, I caught a bus, I rode a train, I sailed on the ocean, I swam in oceans, I loved and I lost, I found family, and, along the way, I stumbled upon myself and I returned “home.” Anonymity had led me to identity. I learned one thing, the most valuable lesson:
“If you miss the moment, you miss your life.”
