I have a peculiar relationship with travel. I complain when I am on the road, but I am listless when I am back at home. I daydream about heading out when I’m in one place for too long. The Germans call it wanderlust; others say there is a travel bug. A Bengali proverb mischievously describes someone like me with a rhetorical question- “have you come here with your horse still saddled up?”
I have crisscrossed the planet many times and each time I have felt a sense of restlessness and paradoxically, of peace. Each time I have been away, I have been reminded of why I yearned to be back. Each time I was back, I reminisced about the parts of me I left in places far away. I have lost count of how many flights I have fallen asleep on, and of how many hotel beds I have woken up in- dissolving in the hallucinogenic intervals of lost bags, smudged entry stamps in passports, and midnight chats in taxis flashing by half-built buildings and bright neon hoardings.
Sometimes, being jet-lagged is waking up and not knowing where you are, what time it is, or how long you have slept. In hotel rooms, I have been awakened by the noise of the bathing of strangers in adjacent rooms, their laughter in hallways in the middle of their night, or their quarrels on balconies in languages I do not know. Travel enough and you collect so many of these snap audio tales.
Each trip taken connects me with other people. As Andrew Solomon observes: “you cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered.” Paris is not just the Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower: it is the city where Eastern European migrants play classical violin in Metro stations. Oaxaca is that child full of promise coloring pictures of azul mountains on a curbside. Cusco is that blind indigenous old woman with a wizened face selling scarves at San Pedro on Easter Sunday.
I do not travel to simply see places, as I once did. I travel to remind myself of my insignificance, to feel gratitude for the light and the air, to be hypersensitive to the strange and wonderful human race, and to rage and sob softly against indifference and cruelty wherever I see it. So often, it is the case that other people make travel interesting and the places themselves are just stages for their presence.
Ultimately then, travel is form of disciplined self-negation. When you travel, your own problems do not matter in the face of the pressing need to find food, shelter, or a working internet connection. These are not theoretical abstract concerns. Even when you are lying on a beach staring at the waves or impatiently waiting for a train that will not come, you are waiting for something.
And so, travel is a form of hyperawareness- of finding yourself looking for patterns that are familiar. In strange lands, I search for a warm smile, a kind word, and a shared meal. For ultimately, you do not acutely miss the people you are with, until you are separated from them and forced to wander among strangers.
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