I started traveling in my 20's, and by traveling I mean backpacking. Travel was a well orchestrated plan; backpacking was something different- a vague idea, a feeling in the pit of your stomach, a yearning. This was back in the 90's, before cell phones, apps, and booking sites kept everything tidy and predictable.
A well worn, dog eared copy of "Let's Go Europe", an overstuffed backpack, and a two month Eurail punch pass was the loose outline for my trip abroad.
As you prepare to travel you have to unravel some things. Life does not pause while you are away, and you can't be in two places at once. You have to start the slow dance of letting go for a brief time, taking bits and pieces of your life and carefully disentangling them to put the relevant ones in your travel bag.
What is left still fills the space, like relics, ready to collect dust and sit in the stale air of waiting. Everything left behind, chosen and relevant at some point, now just placeholders, extraneous.
With last things packed, travel documents stuffed in side pockets, finally the zipper seals it all like an "amen" at the end of a prayer. And so it begins.
I remember the first time I heard the term "finding yourself". People would lay it on me like a back handed compliment, Are you going to travel to "find yourself"?
The weeks leading up to these kinds of trips were always rife with opinions and judgements. Despite my immediate repulsion to the phrase "finding yourself," I guess in some ways that was what I was on my way to do. I didn't know it then. Back then I was on a pilgrimage of sorts, following the undertow that was pulling me towards Europe.
That undertow was filled with the books I read, movies I saw, paintings I marveled at, and my mind's own imaginings. So many imaginings. The possibility of the unknown was giant compared to the smallness you tend to collect in the finite spaces life can corner you into.
I have always loved airports; there is an order, a set path that you follow and when you are moving toward the unknown, this consistency is comforting. Check in, security, gate number- a rhythmic drumming in my mind as I follow along.
Airports and airplanes are middle places, gateways, the pause between breaths. My favorite places are the middle places. They are the white space of life, the air between beats, the space between thoughts.
Middle places dont last long, though, and before you know it you're boarding, and then you're landing, and the whoosh of it all leaves you feeling inebriated.
You come out the other side, through the rabbit hole, and on this side things are curiouser. Landing somewhere new does feel a bit like a dream. There is this fuzziness to it all. Everything waiting to be figured out. This is the first step of "finding yourself"
At home you exist in relation to everything, you and your home, you and your family, you and your job, and so on. Here you have landed somewhere with no relation, no familiar comforts.
It's a different kind of unravelling, because you are still whole, just not in the familiar foreground of your life. It leaves you with no choice but to be just you without all the scaffolding that holds you up.
You take your first step out of the airport door, tired, but new.
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