Travel is a Journey

Not a series of disconnected episodes

When life moves past us at lightning speed, it’s hard to keep up, much less recognize those little nudges to slow down, connect the dots or question not just how come, but why. 

I have spent my life in fashionable but fatiguing go-mode, not always moving forward necessarily, but always focused on what lay in wait just ahead.  At its best, this on-the-go lifestyle felt like fearless, calculated ambition.  At its most unproductive, I might call it a naïve ambivalence, an inclination to self-serve and play safe.  

A preoccupation with staying on track, getting what I deserve and leveling up held me in constant motion.      

I don’t know why I never made a practice of pausing more, of looking back.  Where would I be now if I had forced myself to take honest inventory of that overstuffed kitchen drawer of regret and what if?  I simply never assigned much value to a healthy post-mortem or routine of self-reflection.

That is, until a friend recommended I read Julia B. Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.  In an effort to resuscitate and reinvent myself, I devoured the book.  I’m nothing if not someone who takes her homework seriously.  Early in the text, Cameron lays out an aggressive agenda of getting to work.  Her prescription for almost all that smothers our creativity is maddeningly basic – three non-negotiable, handwritten journal pages a day. 

What can I say? It took.  Anyone part of the morning pages club knows some days these pages can unlock almost anything – what’s for dinner, what’s my next blog going to be about and yes, even what’s my calling.  Through these daily reflections, I started flexing a creative muscle I never knew I had.  Almost a year later, I’m still surprised where reflection has taken me.  I’m still surprised I am right here.      

The more I have come to access and draw from my creative well, the more writing has emerged as catalyst, compass and chisel.  Reflection has become so much more than looking back.  It has inspired a craving to be present just as it has honed my perception and fine-tuned my attention to the world around me. 

It was from this place only a few short weeks ago that I realized what I had been calling serendipity and coincidence was really a kind of flow I had waded into with effortless abandon. 

Writing about travel has generously given me an outlet to recall so much of what has surprised and delighted me from places near and far.  It has also armed me quite unexpectedly with a roadmap for a journey I never knew I needed to take – one of self-discovery and calling.  

The more I write from inside that feeling of flow, the more I move and live with inspired clarity and intention.  Fully grasping that, I can see the whole field now for the first time in my life.

By exploring self-discovery through the lens of travel and travel through the lens of self-discovery, I have written my way into a philosophy around movement.  It comes together most clearly for me, when I pay attention to patterns in how we move.  I am convinced those patterns will unlock how we answer the call to adventure one day.

For years, travel was wedged in between sales meetings, holidays and special events.  Once an opening was identified, a destination was secured based on some calculus of aspiration, affordability and good weather.  The trip was meticulously planned and carried out.  It would be all things delicious, relaxing and satisfying.  No sooner had my shoulders dropped than I’d be back home again.  Bags would get unpacked.  My inbox impatient and overflowing.  My shoulders once more stiffened in irksome irritation.   

It seemed the only evidence of any movement was a fading suntan, a photo of something decadent on my iPhone home screen or a random compliment on the earrings I had treated myself to.  It wasn’t that I was ungrateful or didn’t have a good time.  It was that before I knew it, I was back to reality even if my mind was still several time zones away.

But I can’t help but wonder, is that it?

Is that really how we travel?

We block off calendars. 

We go dark.

We check-in and even check-out.

We call travel, P.T.O. – personal time off. 

Time off from what – from life?

What if instead of experiencing travel as a series of disconnected episodes, programmed into empty slots as they come open, we see travel as opportunity? What if travel isn’t a mechanism for getting away so much as it is a method and practice for getting back in touch – for staying in touch – with our inner desires, voices and needs?

In my very first Tessera blog last spring, I inadvertently laid down the tracks for what is now suddenly and so obviously my punchline.

What if travel was our life companion? 

Said another way, what if we invited travel to embed and integrate its impact into every part of our lives – regarding and respecting it as vital connective tissue between our minds, bodies, guts and souls?

My mind darts between trips, between blogs, between moments in time.  I go back to traveling slow in Kyoto, booking an impulsive solo, self-led trip to Austria, unwinding burn-out at an indulgent beach resort in Bali.  Categorically different as these trips might have been, it is unmistakably clear now what they all had in common.

Me.

But I had never thought to connect these trips myself.  My whole life travel was time-out, time off – never a continuance.

Now I’m not pretending here for the sake of dramatic effect that just because I wasn’t always aware of the compounding forces of travel that they weren’t hard at work inside of me.  I know passions, preferences, lessons learned the hard way and cheat codes moved with me from trip to trip.  But outside of streamlining the logistics of travel, I also know I wasn’t ingesting its full meaning each time I journeyed out.  

It took reflection and a deeper awareness of what was calling me to move, to set that part of my story in motion.  I could only tap travel’s transformative power when I accepted it as partner and confidant – as companion.  As I built an enduring relationship with travel, like one has with education or art, one-off sensations and signals fell away to reveal a telling pattern.

At some point, my travels evolved from adapting bits and pieces of someone else’s itinerary to blazing ahead with my own.  I stopped feeling so obligated to follow through on every recommendation I was given, to buy a ticket to every landmark I had no interest in seeing and to eat Michelin-star bragworthy meals so I could check an invisible box. 

I started noticing instead how at peace and energized I felt traveling to my own taste and whim.  As confidence in my own style of experiencing the world grew, I gave myself grace for early evenings, slow lingering lunches and easy, even lazy, mornings.

I stopped acting like a different version of me on the road.  I stopped overlooking what kept me at a distance from travel’s transformative powers in the past.  I challenged myself to really see how one trip was connected to the last and bridged to the next.  In doing so, I accepted travel as throughline.  I allowed it to be both identity shaping and identity defining.

That all may seem so small and yet to me it felt so big. 

By being true to myself I found my travel rhythm. 

I eventually found my calling. 

And I finally, finally recognized travel for what it really was – a series, a never-ending story, a mosaic – but more than anything – a winding, magnificent journey.