"Home" and "family,"... for a time
I believe travel can provide the greatest education as well as a sense of living life to its fullest. But there are trade-offs to experiencing new places and people. Perhaps the most obvious one is that a person is just present for a time. There are emotional ramifications to this, such as making forming attachments problematic. Emotionally, the forming of expectations play a powerful role in travel. Despite effort, expectations just develop. Then one actually sets foot in a place and the lesson in reality commences. If the place does not suit you, it is very relieving to move on. But if some attachment is made to a place and the people there, leaving is hard on me and sometimes hard on others. Then, later on down the road, who ever I met and where ever I went, those people and places move on in time. I am left to process my remembrances alone. These are transient relationships, sometimes based on someone's tourist business. These relationships are not intended to last the test of time. From the traveller's perspective, the people and places came and went in my life. This can be hard to process, even traumatic. It can be easy to get stuck in the memory of these places; obfuscated snapshots of space and time that now exist only in my mind. Living in the moment (and the current location) without succumbing to nostalgia can be hard to handle. It can be helpful to review writings, audio and video recordings and photos, sketches, scars, clothing or things picked up. This is because with enough time passing it can sometimes seem that the experiences never happened; that they belonged to some etherial dream realm.
Adopted hometown, central Vietnam
For me the experience of traveling goes in rolling waves. The waves often go something like: first impressions, getting acclimated and oriented as far as weather and sense of directions, where and where not to buy, eat, stay, etc. A honeymoon period comes, delights, and then departs. Then the experience of a place goes from magical to "everyday." Sometimes a stuck-ness sets in. Future traveling is postponed to achieve comfort and stability at the cost of dullness through repetitive routine. Then, whether because of a visa or something else, the time for departure eventually arrives. When this happens "goodbye" often feels to be too painful of a word to use. I prefer "see you later." But neither party is thinking that we will actually see each other later. In most cases I will not witness those people or that chunk of land again. There is the rare occasion where I make a return trip. But eventually goodbye looms again. Wanderlust for the places not yet seen tug at you. Through it all these swells of the traveling sea roll on. It can be hard to remain buoyant through these swells.
In exchange for constant newness you must accept the norm of being the stranger
Genetics, a place of origin and sense of home is constantly on my mind as I roam about the world. The range provided by airplanes is relatively new to mainstream human society. A simple plane flight can transport our genetics that took hundreds or thousands of years to adapt to our homeland. In this way, just as with our clan, our bodies have strayed from their place of origin. My Northern European heritage struggles in the bright, hot, humid environs of the tropics. It's not natural for me to be here. but my clan and my homeland is removed from me by multiple generations and hundreds of years. This is modern human life for many of us.
