When the Journey Has Its Own Agenda
Vilnius was running a program I could neither intercept nor override
There is a gripping tightness in my upper body as I travel this season. My breath feels trapped – big and unfinished – right around my heart center, across my collarbone and into my neck, armpits and shoulders. As I settle in here, each breath feels a touch more forced and stifled, fading then expiring away knowingly, shamefully unfulfilled. From this impalpable, pleading space, and the physical one I actually occupy in Vilnius, Lithuania, movement and breath simply demand and extract more from me. More effort, more awareness. More contemplation.
From the moment I stepped out onto the sidewalk in Uzupis, a quirky artist neighborhood on the other side of the river from Old Town Vilnius, I sensed that movement was going to take me somewhere I hadn’t planned on going. It was as if it was running a program that I could neither intercept nor override. The more I gnashed and fought against what it dropped in front of me, the stronger its control grew and the more anxious and frustrated I became.
When I’m well-rested, on top of my to-do list and making choices that work for my mind, body, gut and soul, I can step back from a very specific brand of discomfort like this one and see it for exactly what it is – fortifying momentum. But when I’m sleep-deprived from a continuous string of nights spent on edge, deciphering unpredictable ticks in an old, creepy Airbnb, I can and will unapologetically reject anything that carries the slightest hint of trial, tribulation or life lesson. My resolve dissolves.
When I’m struggling to acclimate, I’m not looking for pearls of wisdom. I want peace of mind. I want to seek refuge in routine. I want what every pushed-to-her-limit six-year-old whines for.
I want to go home.
After decades of travel, either self-led and solo or with family and friends, I have rarely, if ever, encountered true bouts of homesickness. These spells, if they could be defined as such, have never dragged on longer than it took to recover after a good night’s sleep from a first day’s overzealous agenda. That is, until I landed in Vilnius last week.
Full of lofty expectations and perhaps a return-traveler’s faulty sense of confidence and familiarity, I was suddenly and quite intrusively asked to confront a sensation I first came to diagnose as homesickness. It presented as a lingering longing and heartache, a regret for having disrupted my own status quo and rhythm and an uneasiness and overinflated sense of dread. I naturally and even reflexively assumed home was the only place I could go to regain any sense of the equanimity, belonging and balance that I had lost.
During those first few days in Vilnius, I scoured the United Airlines’ website for flights to come home early. I was certain of only one thing. I needed to get as far away as I could from whatever it was that was making me feel so hypersensitive to every last silly, little thing: debilitating jet lag, meals missing their mark, elusive, almost nonexistent encounters, sideways glances, unbearable restlessness.
Rain falling when the sun was shining?!
It seemed early on that my trip to Vilnius, however, had taken to humbling me into creative submission and awakening. Through a long, painfully drawn-out series of barely perceptible, nearly negligible misfires, it forced me to pay attention to a more radical ready-to-surface narrative. Without enlisting catastrophe, it deployed one compounding irritation, miscalculation and disappointment after another. Until it got me right where it wanted me. Alert and aware.
I had expected return-again travel would bring a certain kind of light, enjoyable predictability to my day-to-day movement in Vilnius. I was naively banking on it. I was planning on dining at all the tables that were closed the last time I had come through town. And I was looking forward to returning to the ones that had still enchanted and called to me more than a year later.
As far as I was concerned, my agenda was locked before I arrived. I would wander, buy art, write, read and maybe seriously imagine what it would be like to live here. But all I could do instead in my first few days was manage the deficit I unexpectedly inherited by being too presumptuous and self-assured.
I can see now that travel was merely directing me, dare I say dragging me, closer to all those answers I had been searching for. Had I succumbed to despair during any one of those attempts to change my flight, I wouldn’t be sitting where I am today, writing Tessera Ed. 78, overlooking Lake Ungurys from Esperanza Lake Resort in Paunguriu, Lithuania. I would have left prematurely without the lesson. I would have left without any nudge toward what might come next.
The danger in pursuing comfort and detouring around what we do not yet understand is that we can dramatically limit our worldview to a finite, fixed perspective. No doubt, I would have been more comfortable back home, but none the wiser or inspired.
Disheartened as I might have felt sticking it out in the days that blurred past, I cautiously came around to accepting what is now so obvious. Self-discovery is meant to be a process shaped as much from the outside-in as from the inside-out. When I entered into a collaboration with travel, after all, I had asked it, intended it and counted on it to teach and stretch me, not coddle and placate me.
That’s why I knew I couldn’t give up and go home. I had to stay. I hadn’t really come to Vilnius again to just eat at Nineteen18 and see more of the city that had captivated me. I had come to Vilnius again to more fully digest and metabolize something that had sat unfinished here for me.
Incredulous now, I wonder how I ever could have thought that would be undemanding and friction-free.
And while I was secretly hoping Vilnius would be a soft and easy palate cleanser, it’s clear to me in retrospect it was always meant to be a provocative, mood-setting starter course, preparing me for what Taste, My Compass, expected on the road ahead.
Before I left for Vilnius, I had set a straightforward intention for my journey – let go and believe. Or take bold steps behind nothing but good old-fashioned blind faith. Deeply unnerving and counterintuitive as it has been at times to put into practice, I had tried to convince myself then that the unknown is as valid a territory to invest in as the game of corporate whack-a-mole I had been mindlessly plugging all my quarters into just two years ago.
As these months have passed, I have tried with all my might, too, to rewire a lifelong, drilled-in instinct to just follow the damn path already charted out for me on the map.
But it’s no more my path than it ever was my map.
As I stare out onto the brilliantly mossy green waters of Lake Ungurys, marveling at the calm and crispness of the forest’s reflection, I allow myself to feel the slightest sense of progress and achievement. Instead of boarding one of those flights to Chicago this week, I took an Uber here. And in the days that followed, I did wander, read and contemplate life as a Lithuanian. I tried the tasting menu at Deep Roots and enjoyed cocktails again at Nick and Nora. But more tellingly, I chose to create the conditions for well-being and harmony from a place far more lasting and accessible than home.
I chose to wrestle them out from within.
In doing so, I realized the tightness I had been feeling in my chest wasn’t fear of what was yet to come; it had been pressure building up from holding on too long and too tight to what I was meant to set free and release.
The same could be said of the version of me that had shown up last week in Vilnius. What a sad and utter failure it would have been if I had come all this way only to walk in, through and out just as I was.
What’s meant to come next, be it just another revitalizing deep breath or a wholehearted commitment to living a life of purpose, will eventually find us if we do but one crazy simple thing.
Let go and believe.
