A Letter to the First-Time Traveler
To the embarking ones
As I myself prepare for an upcoming, long-awaited trip to Cape Town, I can’t help but think back to my maiden voyage across the Atlantic. The butterflies in my stomach, the prerequisite research and prep, the mounting expectation.
At the same time, I can’t help but lament that over the years I have allowed myself to become far too desensitized, too “experienced” and affected to indulge in any acts of pre-journey daydreaming.
This often overlooked and rushed phase of travel is one of its most marvelously undercelebrated benefits. The more we feed it, the more it comes to life, fueling both our excitement and curiosity. It is the one part of travel we can fully control. All we have to do is ask where we want our journey, in every sense of the word, to transport us.
This year, through deliberate pacing and paying attention to my own internal rhythms, I finally cleared enough space to feel travel’s call stir me long before the wheels lifted up. Most notably, inside a single journey, I experienced the difference between what traveling tuned into the right frequencies feels like and what it doesn’t.
The night before I departed to Auckland on my then first-draft itinerary for New Zealand, I recall feeling ready but not energized. Visa issues, or Amanda issues getting a visa on time, eventually postponed this specific iteration of the trip. That lapse in turn led me to rework how I moved through New Zealand. Not only did I surrender to Taste, my compass, I paid attention to my energy levels during the reconnaissance and booking process. Not surprisingly, the night before this draft of the trip I slid into bed with a feeling I hadn’t drifted off to in years. Giddiness.
I felt that same giddiness before my trip to Mexico City a couple months later. I am soaking it up again now before leaving for Cape Town. It has made me realize that I want to forever be the kind of traveler who departs aglow in gratitude and bliss. I don’t want more travel to translate only into more miles and status. I want more travel to mean more childlike joy and wonder in my life.
And I don’t want to stop there.
What I really want is for every trip I take from this point forward to feel like that very first one. I was crammed in the back middle of an Air France flight to Paris as unequivocally giddy as I will ever be. As life would have it, those would be an instrumental first 5,000 miles. Fortuitous first steps in a winding, unpredictable journey of purpose and becoming.
In addition to choosing to properly relish pre-departure anticipation, I am also choosing to luxuriously adopt a first-time traveler’s mindset. Behind it, I will be able to slide fresh lens after fresh lens into view, buoyantly shifting with each perspective and possibility. Without having to shed any of my previous experience across twenty-plus years and six continents, I am confident I will enjoy a whole new set of perks traveling with this beginner’s mind.
I will also be able to embrace the unique opportunity I have been given as a writer who travels, and as a traveler who writes, to share my lessons in moving with the first-time traveler. Two such travelers, who occupy a very dear place in my life, will take their first trips to Europe this summer.
Tessera 68 is dedicated and written for them, and for all who are about to embark on their first, formative foray. For all who are about to discover more about their passions and proclivities. For all who are about to learn the language of connect, collide and expand.
What follows is a heartfelt letter to the first-time traveler.
**
To the embarking ones:
The best souvenir is free. Bring home living snapshots. Take hundreds of mental pictures not just of what you see, but of what you feel when you see it. These sensory imprints will become the kind of rich and layered memories that you can always access and come back to whenever life stings and smarts. They require only that you slow down and get present, that you look up and around, and that you softly close your eyes to snap each moment into place.
Make every effort to remember how a place, for reasons you can’t sometimes even explain, stopped you in your tracks, took your breath and made you gasp and soften. Take note of how you slid into a peace and calmness you never could have imagined you would have felt before. These are Travel’s divine interactions. They remind us life is big and sprawling, but also sweetly contained, uncomplicated and still.
Remember how the blazing, unencumbered sun scrunched up your brow, how the cool breeze off the sea bristled up your back, how your mouth watered just before you took your first lick off that perfectly stacked cone of gelato.
These moments are meant only for you, just as you are, as only you could have snapped them. They are enduring and everlasting whether they remain top of mind or settle just out of reach deep within you. They are just the beginning of your life’s reel and body of work.
Follow your heart. Get to know its rhythm and its signals: a quickening pulse, a skipped and suspended heartbeat, an unexpected flutter. Never doubt your heart knows the way. All you have do is follow it.
Seek out what you love, not what the world tells you should love and seek. Obey mysterious nudges down a beckoning side street, inside an unassuming church, to a table in a bustling café or to the perfect pair of earrings in that artisan shop.
Say yes one day to the long way around. And the next day, take the shortcut. Get lost. Then retrace your steps and get lost all over again. Take the stairs. Climb the hill. Wait in the line. Go back for the shirt, the shot, the sight.
And always look both ways before you cross the street.
Linger. Whenever you can, don’t rush. If the universe is begging you to slow down and take notice, slow down and take notice. The world has something special to say to you, to show you. The moments in between the scheduled ones are often the most magical.
Most of all, trust that travel in return will linger inside of you. A journey once it’s begun is never truly over.
Find stillness. Untether. Even if it’s just for a few minutes on a choppy ferry ride, in front of your morning coffee and brioche col tuppo, at a piazza fountain as the crowds and pigeons flock in random flurry, find stillness. Be with yourself and your thoughts. Cherish and record this once-in-a-lifetime chance to get to know this version of you in this place. With the rest of the world tuned out or in slow motion, ask yourself: where do your daydreams take you? Where do you long to go next?
Survey just enough, and just a little bit. There’s always room for some planning inside a trip. Know enough to know heading in, what you would have been devastated to have missed out on. If you love coffee, research the best cafes or local ways to try it. And if you love coffee, for heaven’s sake, make sure you try an affogato.
As you survey, always pay attention to what sits you straight up and when your eyes start to glaze over. Those are two different but very important signals. Don’t apologize for what does and doesn’t capture your attention. Listen to it. Honor it. Follow it.
Try. And try again. The advice you knew was eventually coming. Put your tastebuds to the test. If not here, where? Nibble, peck, dip, scrape and slurp. Just don’t yet dismiss, shut down or close off. Try. And try again.
Any chance you get, order an experimental dish for the table. What’s the worst that could happen? Everyone hates it? But maybe, just maybe, you will like it. It will click into place a whole new appreciation for taste and trying. It could even open up a whole new world, setting a life you never thought about living in fragrant motion.
Savor every encounter. Every last encounter, coincidence and collision has purpose and meaning. Pay attention to these validations and redirects. Store them away too for safekeeping. One day you will need them.
Document for the future you. I wish I could say the right words to make you believe that one day you’ll have wished you recorded it all: every shade of emotion, every spark of anticipation, every burst of knowing and believing. Wherever you come to put it down, document it. Scribble it out the old-fashioned way, record a video or a voice memo, download a journaling app. Just do the future version of yourself a big favor, and capture the details, the drama, the disappointment and the discovery.
And one more thing. Along the way, remember to take pictures of the things that aren’t just the THING. Everyone gets that picture. But what do you see? An older couple holding hands? A family bowled over in laughter? A shadow of a solo traveler? Your own shadow? The pictures you snap of the world as you see it, will be the ones you’ll return to over and over again. After all, they aren’t just pictures of that place. They are soulful reflections of you.
Share and pay it forward. Package up a moment that meant something real to you, that made you laugh, turned you around or gave you the goosebumps. And then share it. Turn it into a point of connection between you and someone that matters. Keep the joyful ripple effect of travel fluid and alive.
Marvel. At the end of your journey after a long trip home, you’ll collapse heavy and exhausted into bed. And that’s exactly when you’ll marvel at the fact you woke up that very same morning in another country, in another bed, in another part of the world. It’s wild, really. And how marvelous that it happened to you.
Marvel, too, at who you were the last time you fell asleep in that bed. A little different, I bet?
May the meaning and memories of your trip settle in and around you.
***
Finally, no matter how much time you spend under its wing, Travel will always be a generous and willing companion, co-conspirator and confidante. If you arrive with a hungry, open heart, it will never fail to feed and nourish you.
I hope you let it.
I hope you forge a long and lasting collaboration with this brilliant, benevolent force. I hope it not only enlightens and invigorates you, but that it inspires you twenty-plus years and six continents later to embrace travel just as you did here forevermore.
From one eternal first-time traveler to the next, I wish you and your hearts the safest of passages.
