When the right people stay back home.....
When I travel I love to feel a part of the passing scene; I like to hunker down for a few days, develop a routine, find a bar, a grocery store, a bakery, one that becomes my own, and where the proprietor smiles when I come in for bread or my evening drink ..something I wouldn't have at home.
Sometimes, it goes further. Sometimes, I start to believe that I'd actually enjoy life as a cook in a truck stop kitchen, as long as that kitchen is in the Basque country. Sometimes, I actually want to chuck it all in and be like that girl selling homemade flapjack on a windy expanse of carpark in the West of Ireland; I can see me heading back to my peat fire at night, listening to the wind and rain hard against the windowpanes, being cosy and warm, all wrapped up in some woollen confection, rife with cables and the smell of lanolin. These lives seem more fully alive than mine.
It's more travel voyeurism than empathy. I'm pretty sure I'd get tired of sassing gruff, possibly alcoholic, road warriors in about a day and a half, and my lungs aren't cut out for damp and cold climates, no matter how soft and green they might be. But the romantic in me wants to be part of something picturesque; something a little more connected than my life as it is. I live in a rural suburb. I have a nodding acquaintance with many of my neighbours, but I can count only a few that I can have a good conversation with. And I don't seek that out. Somehow I'm too busy not quite managing the household and focussing on work to have a life outside of my own four walls.
The trouble is that our life is finite. There's not enough time to do it all. As my friend Kerry, who has done quite a bit of it ,says, "you can only travel one road at a time". Right now, the road I'm on is the road I've chosen, and travel is only a little bit of a detour every now and then, a little call of the open road, to which like Toad of Toad Hall, I am powerless to say no.
Because I can't do it all, I must instead develop my imagination and go abroad within the confines of my own head. Travel books help create an imaginary world that I can visit without recourse to airline flight and a budget; but as anyone knows who has travelled to a place they've read about previously, it's not like that; it NEVER is. Which is why I wish there was more time and money. I want to experience it for myself. ALL of it.
Part of me forgets entirely that I am a person of a certain age. The me who goes a-wandering, is my younger self, and not even that, one of my many imaginary younger selves--braver, smarter, prettier, thinner, better dressed....I am the Indiana Jones of my own imaginings; with a hint of Stevie Nicks and Colette thrown in for good measure.
It's a lot of fun, this wandering through time and place, but from time to time I draw back a little and ask myself, why do you not go deep, rather than wide. Shouldn't you immerse yourself in your day to day life? Cannot you get satisfaction from a day's work well done? A dinner cooked well and appreciated? Time spent watching the hummingbirds at the feeders on the back deck?
Well, I do get satisfaction from these things, of course I do. But......
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.
These words of Annie Dillard' about structure used to inspire me but now they just make my feet itch to be on the road.
I no longer want a schedule. Intellectually, I know that I ought to be savouring each moment as it comes, since that's all that really exists at any given moment, but I want a little chaos and whim from time to time.
Last year, I did a photo journal, one a day, to help me focus in on the present. I have a great life, and I know it, but sometimes I want one of those other lives. Maybe as a back-up singer--floaty clothes, glittering venues, a tambourine...sigh....
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