Off the Traveler's Track

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

In the time before Great Pandemic in 2020, I was a frequent traveller. I received my first passport stamp back in 2016 To Europe and before 2016 my travel dominated in exploring my country in domestic travel. 

I recently finished reading Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was a trip down the memory lane on how it felt like to travel endlessly. Much of the book is an insight & fact-based research on trying to make sense of marriage while on exile from her own country with her lover Filipe. They lived as a nomad moving from one hotel to another, one city to another. They did miss their real life, in a home, a stationary home. Travel and real-life give rise to a potent realization. The book is good, insightful & heavy on research than personal essays. 

I took thousands of pictures in varying locales over the years. It is a bliss, a ticket to the past, as I was conjuring up potent remembrances. Yet countless other photos are mere background noise, long expunged from memory, a placeholder of life on the move.

Then, the pandemic put a stop to most travel around the world. During the mandatory lockdown, I only went outside for essentials & food, not even for exercise. I’ve spent countless hours in video calls with family & friends. I embraced my hobby to keep the creativity flowing, started experimenting with colours & dabbling with brushes more than ever before, and read books rather voraciously. Kindle came to my rescue during the complete lock-down! I could buy ebooks since the shipping services had all come to a halt. 

How we all miss travelling, going around making memories. Even stepping out to a cafe. Seeing new places & learning about a new culture. And that’s the beauty of travel — it forces us outside our comfort zones & pushes us into the unknown sphere of our lives. Our lives are ceaselessly unspooling stories. How we make sense of them tells us about ourselves. Humans are eternal explorers, endlessly curious about life around them. On an eternal quest to look forward to keep moving. 

Much has changed, while other things remain the same in our lives. We can no longer hop on a flight or train to a new place without being fearful. We can no longer plan our vacations we grew up thinking — One day, I’m sure I’ll visit this place for the requisite sightseeing and explore a new side of life. In our hearts, we are so eager to go someplace new, beyond the grocery stores or workout, for mere entertainment. Feels like the 2020 pandemic has pushed us back in time before the world had so many different sources of entertainment, not to forget, we still have our internet keeping us connected. 

As I go through the old pictures, taking me back to the places I once visited, surfacing in my thoughts ever so fresh, like it was the only yesterday. 

I wonder when will it be next?