The Journey is Far From Over Once We Get Home
Home is the palate cleanser that keeps the current of travel alive
I sat down this morning intending to position Blog 29 as a palate cleanser that would put a bow on tastes and reflections from my Poland-Baltics travels as it set the stage for new adventures ahead in Slovenia and Luxembourg. I would be at home only three weeks in between these two trips – a length of time in retrospect that felt perfectly purposeful. Short enough to sustain a momentum I’d ignited in creativity and conviction on the road, but long enough to encourage a return to healthy habits and a mind-body-soul reset.
The R75 Rhubarb Sorbet, Lime Caviar & Champagne palate cleanser at Noa Chef’s Hall in Tallinn, Estonia
My thoughts surprisingly linger longer than expected on the notion of home… in particular on its shifting role and meaning to me as I settle into a new path as a traveling founder. As I orbit around this topic, I feel its pull on me intensify. I’ve come to recognize this feeling.
It is inspiration.
After a few rounds of mental gymnastics, home emerges as the ideal and only starting place from which to write Blog 29 especially when I look at it through the lens of my calling and purpose. Wholly preoccupied with that learning curve, I hadn’t recognized until now that home has become an invaluable incubator of critical, creative and restorative import.
I think about what my Poland-Baltics travels set in motion as the first of five extended journeys back-to-back with similar three-week breaks in between. I realize what a mischaracterization it would be to only see home as a place to sleep in my own bed, swap out my clothes and rediscover discipline at the gym, on the yoga mat or in the kitchen. If I only see home as the intermission between travels then I’m not leveraging one of the more transformative plays in the intentional travel playbook.
Whether we have three weeks between trips or 12 months, home is a marinade to soak in, not a dead spot to pass through. Home is both a frontline for absorbing travel’s full impact and a sanctuary for safeguarding all of our soulful souvenirs.
When we are wrapped up in cocoons of familiarity and structure, we are usually best equipped to re-examine and process the true impact of our travels without judgment or pressure. We can evaluate how far our travels have really carried us, not in miles logged, points awarded or pictures taken, but in the intangible sacred space that inevitably opens up deep within when the little invitations travel choreographs for us –
land just so.
While travel might be where we brush up against fateful catalysts, connections and curiosities, home is where they must take root if they are to become a formative part of our identities. I wince a little thinking that until recently I have spent my entire life assigning the value and meaning of travel exclusively to its point of contact. By doing so I had been minimizing travel’s far-reaching ripple effect which no matter how far it spreads or wherever it flows, will still always, always, always follow us back home.
If we are willing to accept our home state and our travel state as one harmonious force, then we can unlock yet another level of travel’s transformative power. It’s the difference of looking at the relationship between home and travel as a smooth reciprocal partnership or as a tumultuous on again, off again romance. To choose the former requires we shift our mindset from travel as a distinctly separate oasis to home life, to travel as an enriching, always-on frequency set to complement home life. In this headspace, we get to extend the boundaries of where, when and how travel inspires us. We get to stretch them out into a continuous spectrum, a current that blurs the line between starting point and destination and what it means to be here or there.
Without question, home proved a productive metaphor for getting me to see the immense value of the in between. I can think of no better way to actually bring this piece home than to share how a friend’s warm and timely out of the blue call affected me last week. It is and I suspect always will be some of the most meaningful, resonant advice I’ve ever received.
I’d just had dinner with him and his wife. He had sensed through my writing and our casual conversation that evening how going out on my own was still making me feel anxious and uneasy about my future. We made small talk for a bit before he posed a simple, unaccusatory question. “Amanda, what’s your worst-case scenario,” he asked? He was essentially asking if I chose to travel, to write and to reconnect with myself over the next couple years versus play it safe with a corporate job – what was the worst thing that could happen?
In asking me a single pointed question, he did the job no sorbet, piece of pickled ginger or parsley could ever have done. He gave me a remarkable gift of pause, confidence and peace of mind. He may not have realized it at the time, but he served up the ultimate palate cleanser and it wasn’t just between my last trip and this next one, it was between an outdated version of myself and this new unrealized expression of me. May none of us ever underestimate the power of a phone call.
I knew he knew the answer to the question when he asked it. But to play it out? My worst-case scenario? I travel, I write and I reconnect with myself from places I’ve only ever dreamed of going. I’m more than willing to bet on myself to see this ‘most terrible’ outcome play out. Thinking about that phone call, even now an uncontainable smile spreads out across my face. I see what it really was here in the in between. Travel, my life companion, had extended, just as it’s done so many times on the road before one of those little invitations. This time it had landed just so right in the middle of my own living room.
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