Rock Traversing

a meditation on travel

At the time of this publication I am (hopefully) sitting in London’s Heathrow Airport waiting to board a flight back to Atlanta. I have likely been awake since midnight (Atlanta time) traveling from Newcastle to London. Seeing as I am almost entirely incapable of sleeping on planes I will probably not sleep again until I’m back in Atlanta tonight. I could easily be awake for 22 or more hours. The silver lining here is that I will be so exhausted that my body will have an easier time shaking off the jet lag. A blessing and a curse.

This is of course supposing all my plans, the ones that have been in the works for months, have gone off smoothly. If all goes according to those plans, then today will be the last day of a whirlwind international trip. At this point I will have seen London, Geneva, Edinburgh, and Newcastle. 3 different countries. I will have spent time traveling solo and spent time with dear friends. I will have experienced staying in a hotel room with no windows, seeing the English countryside, eating Swiss chocolate in actual Switzerland, taking the tube, seeing a Scottish castle (or two), laughing with the funniest human I know, taking in the Alps, driving on the other side of the road, talking into the night with two magical human creatures, and a thousand other unnameable moments.

But at this exact moment it’s a chilly Tuesday morning some weeks before I ever step onto an airplane. I’m drinking apple cinnamon tea and Birdie is snoozing on the couch next to me. I’ve wrapped her in a blanket because that’s what you do with adorable sleeping dogs. You wrap them.

The beauty of travel is that you become a time bender, a wizard of the clock, the ultimate controller of destiny. To travel means getting on a plane and finding yourself in another place. It’ll take mere hours to get somewhere that would have taken days or weeks by any other means. That plane can take you back in time or forward. Your body won’t believe what your mind knows when you get there. The sunrises and sunsets you witnessed from the plane mean nothing. The meals they served are unrelated to your body’s needs and desires. The airplane is built of magic in that way. It’s a capsule frozen in a moment. An artifact from a different land and different place.

Travel also means casting yourself into the future. The planning and coordination leading up to such a journey entails predicting the type of person you will be. What will I want to see and taste and do? What will be the best way to travel given who I will be at the time? It’s fortune telling. It’s painting a picture of the person you aren’t yet.

That’s one of the reasons I like travel so much. I get the opportunity to plan my life and predict the person I’ll be when the moment arises in distinctly concrete terms. It’s tangible agency. I buy this ticket and then I go do that very thing. It’s a form of cause and effect that feels out of the ordinary.

It’s not that my everyday life is chaos and travel allows me agency I don’t otherwise have. In fact it’s quite the opposite. My life is so chock-full of routines, rituals, and patterns that I sometimes forget how much agency I possess. The centripetal force of my life has me spinning in the same daily circles. I, like many people I assume, am on autopilot a lot of the time. Travel, in its magical witchy ways, gives us the opportunity to break from that spin. We get to leave our well-worn ruts for a brief moment and taste something different.

That hunger in me, to taste the whole world, was so strong in my younger days. I wanted it all. Everything. All at once. I wanted to see everything and meet everyone and know everything. I wanted cliffs and valleys and cities and oceans and mountains and lakes and towns. My spirit wanted to gobble it all up.

And while age, and its accompanying responsibilities and rules, have tempered that inferno some, it hasn’t been snuffed out completely. Every time I travel, be it to the other side of the world or just an undiscovered part of town, I’m reminded of something. We only get a finite amount of time on this giant rock hurling itself through outer space. It’s a wildly precarious gift and a weighty charge. Personally I want to explore as much of that rock as I can.