I had a realization as I wandered through Washington, D.C. with a friend a few years ago that people that have left our hometowns and the comfortable worlds in which we grew up are both fortunate and disadvantaged. When you leave your small world and see the world it becomes clearer that you might never be satisfied with what you've seen and experienced because you know there's always more. It becomes an insatiable need to expand and grow and see more. The "bug" as we call it for travel is more a never ending need to continue pushing outwards.
I look back at who I was in high school, when I had only traveled a bit and still felt the need for home. I've always been a homebody to a certain extent, but as I've traveled, starting in Japan and Guatemala in my teenage years, my need to travel has started to overcome the need for home. I still look back and think that if I'd never left Cumberland, Maine I wouldn't have known how amazing the world is. I likely would have ended up with my "high school sweetheart" and would likely be "happy" because he was a good person and I hadn't known more. I went away to college, studied abroad, and was obsessed with seeing the world. I had broken my bubble and couldn't really go back at that point.
The world as we perceive it becomes less expansive, seems smaller as you see just how much more there is to see. I see now that what really happens is that our circle and our reality becomes much bigger. Leaving your bubble just means you pop it. Everything that was once inside it still exists, but they've become a part of an even bigger bubble still, not contained by the original soap mixture as before. In fact, the soap may be a totally different scent, a different shade, and it spreads everyone out more. It's easier to have friends everywhere but harder to keep track of them all. The wonderful people I've met during my travels are people I'd really like to have near me, but my bubble won't keep them close because of the sheer size of the thing. There are fewer walls and different perspective. Everything becomes both more difficult and easier.
I'm at a point in my travels, about three weeks in, that I've lost the need for home I felt at the beginning and am starting to dread the return. I regain my desperation to be out in the world and my restless travel side. I don't think it's the same travel desperation others I meet "on the road" face in that they don't ever want to go home. I find I'm meeting more and more who want to set up and "settle" as I do. I feel however, that I want to settle in the places I'm meeting people, so that I don't have to move on from them or run the risk of going somewhere again that I have no one. It's hard to keep traveling knowing I will continue to meet wonderful people that I may never see again. I want to stop and hold them all hostage and start our lives here in Argentina right now!
So as I go on and think about making decisions on where to go and with whom to go, I remind myself of the Spanish sentence I've been passing through my head on some of the long bus rides where I've had too much time to think: La vida es corta y larga a la vez. Life is short and long at the same time.
It's time to live and love and have fun in the moment. I may miss some sights, as I did this past weekend spending time in the hostel and surrounding neighborhood with my new friends, but I'm a person who remembers not the museums but the people and those people will be still in my head and heart in five or ten years.
La vida es corta y larga a la vez, so I hope we all learn to live right now.
2 comments:
Love you Kelsey girl! A. Ann
You continue to amaze me. From the day you were born you have taken on everything with a clear focus and a GPeg sense of adventure. When you were little you didn't want to go to sleep because you thought you'd miss something. It took us a while to convince you that we weren't doing anything, just sleeping, and that you should too. Love you.
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