From the Edge of a Reflective Oasis
When a Single Moment Won’t Do
photo credit: graphic by author
As time passes and experiences fade, it’s hard to say for certain why some first impressions burrow in and others float regrettably away without much rhyme or reason. Some places, it seems, just inexplicably take hold of us, no matter how much or how little they go on to move us. Their first impressions stay rooted somewhere fixed and lasting deep inside.
I can still remember as if it were only yesterday, the way my whole nervous system bristled after first venturing into the colorful pandemonium of Marrakech’s Old Town Medina.
I can still summon the same heartwarming glow that settled my doubtful writer’s soul after catching an unforgettable first glimpse of storybook Vilnius at magic hour.
And I can still feel my senses brace against the massive affront that assaulted them upon meeting massive, imposing Seoul just before the softest pink sunrise broke across the horizon, unexpectedly pacifying them.
Over twenty years later, I can still recall that within just hours of landing in London, I had wanted to pick up my whole life and move there. I remember feeling a nearly identical attraction to the dazzling waterfront cities of Wellington, New Zealand; Hvar, Croatia and Stockholm, Sweden.
Last autumn, jumping in my rental car right after an overnight flight, I can still remember thinking en route from Ljubljana to Lake Bled that I should pinch myself, musing that beauty of this scale and intensity could really only be the stuff of transatlantic ORD to LJU dreams.
And when day truly did turn to night?
Hong Kong wowed in the wee hours of the morning. Kyoto enchanted right out of the train station. And Singapore glistened. I can still picture myself in the back of those taxis, craning my neck up and out their rolled-down windows for fear of missing even an inch of an epic skyline or a moody neighborhood silhouette.
Out of all my first impressions, though, I suspect none will ever stack up to the one made by The Floating City. I can still relive in the most vivid of detail exactly what it felt like to board that water taxi at Venice’s Marco Polo airport station and emerge on the other side of the early morning fog among all those spectacular mazes of canals.
The Canals of Venice
Memory and retrospect are peculiar, complicated travel companions, arbitrarily and interchangeably moving between friend and foe, archivist and illusionist. Unless we take up an active role in shaping our travel memories, we can expect at some point along the way to be at the mercy of their fickle and fleeting company.
They impose no different rules for travel than they already play by in our everyday lives, giving us very little agency or course to hold on to what we want or store away what we need. Oftentimes, they will raid our most precious meet-cutes, write over character-defining initial reactions or rob us of those most powerful sparks of early recognition.
While I personify them here for the sake of drama, memory and retrospect are merely manifestations of our own willingness and openness to witness and absorb life as it is. And it is, after all, our choice to be and stay present across travel, electing whenever we are away from home to either skimp on or digest its full menu of moments.
For if travel is a journey, not a series of disconnected episodes, how does it ultimately serve us, if we let pressure and stress, overextension and a lack of capacity, drivel and distraction, fray or, even worse, snip this critical connective thread? What joy and wonder, intuition and wisdom do we involuntarily relinquish when we allow this chain of accumulated meaning to break?
I’m posing these rhetorical questions less to chastise and more to implore that we simply travel with our minds, bodies, guts and souls aligned the next time. Reupping our commitment is not about looking back and wallowing in our wrongs, nor is it about focusing on what’s been lost or forgotten.
It’s about recognizing what we can do to bring our fullest selves online wherever we happen to be on the journey today. Thankfully, too, that’s a forward-looking practice, far more within our control.
When I take stock of the state of mind I’m in right now, I put myself in a position to better architect and preserve the contents of my own travel memory bank in the future.
My current midlife circumstances, most notably an appetite for learning the obscure and niche, seem to have by all accounts carried me to the edge of a reflective oasis.
At first, I foolishly spend my time on its banks wishing that at birth I had been handed a much more sophisticated how-to manual. Why am I just now learning all the good stuff in my forties? Then I lament the time I’ve wasted insisting I had all the answers when I could have been building a fabulous life pursuing them instead. All the while, I am burning precious energy trying to resuscitate every last first impression from my travels, getting especially down on myself for having let those from my most treasured, inspired journeys slip unceremoniously away.
And before I know it, I’m rebuking my own advice. I’m wallowing in self-pity, what-ifs and regret. But no sooner have I spiraled off in the wrong direction than this counterproductive, upside-down perspective gives me an invaluable new way to look at memory and retrospect.
What if instead of accusing my memory of overriding or my subconscious of mishandling, I trust that I prioritized and kept only what I had needed? What if I accept that I might actually have had enough? Enough to course-correct and do it better in the future and enough to be grateful for where I have been and where I have come to stand today.
And what if instead of dwelling on first impressions, beautiful and poetic as some may be, I consider the expansive, transformative power of the aggregate? By zooming out, I can encounter the same beauty and grace in the often overlooked aggregate impression.
All morning, I have been deriding myself for losing somewhere along the way my very first impression from my very first city traveled abroad: Paris. Try as I did, I simply couldn’t remember what it had looked or felt like when I first came upon it. I initially assumed that this gap in my memory was a function of my being too entitled, too oblivious or too reckless. And it might very well still be.
But what’s clear is I had been trying to retrieve and relive a single moment where, in fact, I have so evidently digested and saved an entire highlight reel. I had been reducing memory to a simple stock when it should have been a bouillabaisse.
Proof that Paris had effectively moved me exists behind not one return trip but five, including one for my fortieth birthday. I may not have emotionally registered my Parisian handshake, but Paris’ everlasting impact on me lives documented well below the surface: in my decision to return there time and again, to share it with those I love and to taste it again and again.
I don’t need a memory of a first impression to remind me of all that.
If we truly treat travel as a journey, and we put each trip’s memory in its place in one long daisy chain, including the placeholders and the partial ones, we will see our story. We will see that some places stay with us because we need them to – to point the way, to accentuate a void, to inspire a wholesale change. We will see that some places drift away from us because we need them to, too, for the very same reasons: to point the way, to accentuate a void, to inspire a wholesale change.
By connecting it all together, we will see how forgetting inspires us to remember all the more.
Follow the unplanned moments that make travel matter.
Read Collisions, a weekly Encounter Series by The Untethered Traveler.
