This is why once you’ve traveled for the first time all you want to do is leave again. They call it the travel bug, but really it’s the effort to return to a place where you are surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Spanish or Mandarin or Portuguese, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave, change, grow, experience, learn, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown then you did in the most foreign place you visited.
This is the hardest part about traveling, and it’s the very reason why we all run away again.
Kellie Donnelley.
I wanted to store this piece that talks of the hardest part of traveling. I need to think about it.
Travel changes a person or, perhaps, in my case, it turned me into someone I recognised. I was always curious, I love meeting new people, learning how they live, hearing their stories ... out here in the world I wander, I get to meet others like me.
I read this quote this morning, and thought ... really?
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil
I always give my attention. I am curious, and genuinely interested in people. Is this so special?
Then I remembered the phenomena of talking with political folk out at social events back in Belgium. Their attention was on their phones, on checking out who else was in the room, and back to whoever they were talking with, and off again, round the room.
I felt like I was swimming with sharks, in some ways. They were hunting. Their attention was everywhere and nowhere.
But this sense of dislocation Kellie writes of ... I posted her piece over on Facebook and watched as various friends shared or liked it.
Yes. They all knew that feeling.
I haven't returned home, for longer than 5 weeks. It is something I think about ... how that return would be. Would a dog, and a beach or a lake somewhere close by ... old friends, and new, be enough.
I don't know but anyway, I have located this article in a place where I can return to it when needed.