It's a funny thing, coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what's changed is you. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is the first summer that I haven't traveled in, gosh, seven years. Most of my days are spent kind of wandering around our little house in my pj's, licking peanut butter off of the same spoon I licked peanut butter off of the day before, and making faces in the mirror. I know what you're thinking, "Bekah - that's gross." Yeah, I'm working on that, I promise. But there is just something missing from this picture-- and I know what it is.
It's that thrill I get when my bags are perfectly organized and minimized to their smallest. When I'm skirting the walls of the airport, because I love the energy of so many people, but I hate being caught in crowds. When the plane takes off and I get to offer gum to the exhausted mother next to me. When I land and take it in that smell of a new place. When my soul trades a patch of itself with the soul of the land and stitches itself back together with memories. Should I go on?
So, I'm experimenting. I'm looking through my old photos. Mexico, Venezuela, Panama, Latvia and Tanzania-- five patches on the crazy quilt of my being-- each having changed a fundamental piece of who I am.
I can still remember coming home from my first trip and not being able to talk for a week. Something in me had shifted so completely, changed so drastically, that I was left silent. It was this feeling of, I don't know, smallness? Yes, smallness. I realized, finally, that in the grand scheme of things, set up against the backdrop of the great-wide-world, I am relatively unimportant.
Which means, of course, that none of the trips I would ever take again would make a smidge of difference. Right? Wrong. They made a difference. They. Changed. ME. And now, without anywhere to go but back to my quiet home, I have two things to say to you:
Immersive travel will not help you fit in. It will make you stand out. You'll never be like the other kids. Your priorities will be different, your world view will be different, even the clothes you wear will be different. But that is a good thing because...
Immersive travel burdens your heart. Nothing was ever changed by an unconcerned person. Things move when humans do: nations are born by those who desire freedom, inequality is fought for by those who recognize inequality.
You'll come back to the same smells, sights, sounds. But I hope you don't come back the same.
