Dear adventurer,
I’m lost. In the wake of my return from a three month backpacking trip through South-East Asia, I have managed to become stranded in my own apartment, lost in my thoughts and devoid of faith that I will ever get myself out of these four walls. But there was a time before when things were different.
There’s a story out there, similar across cultures, and it must be so because it feels like it is a good representation of the traveler’s delights as well as the bane of his adventures: home.
The story usually goes that a traveler stumbles upon a magnificent land where all is plentiful and beautiful and where the most amazing young maiden takes our wary traveler to the castle, where he lives alongside her, all his wishes granted. All is free and open to him with the sole exception of one place where he must never go. As human nature might have it, curiosity takes the best of our hero and he goes to the exact place…where he recalls his home, and all he has ever left behind. He quickly leaves the magic realm for a quick visit home, only to find that time has past differently in his homeland and alas, he can never return to the magic place that he left.
Can you see why this is a traveler’s story? You take the leap, you start your bildungsroman and leave home. You find beautiful places outside the boundaries of your comfort zone and imagination, and it is good. And one faithful day, for whatever reason, you decide to visit ‘home’. THAT home. The traditional, stories of your childhood, been raised there ‘home’. And I know that this is not always the case, some people choose to end their trips, some people have to…but along the long way of finding yourself, going back ‘home’, for whatever reason, seems a bad choice.
There are differences and nuances, but you will find this story everywhere from Scotland to Romania and from the Middle East to East Asia. And it’s just the way I feel: stuck, stranded far from the amazing places that are anywhere else but here – home.
If home is where the heart is, my heart has learned to roam and it casually goes on holidays without me, to places I have or have never been before. Sometimes I wake up and my heart is having coffee on a stone table, in the Spanish mesetta. Other times I’m reading and my heart is pondering the views of Patagonia. I am left heartless as my heart roams. And in the end, it might be my fault, after all, I was the one who bought the plane ticket and got on the plane.
In truth, I believe a traveler can make a life of traveling only because his heart has learned to play with the meaning of what it is ‘to be home’. It needn’t be a static attachment to a singular place, culture, person or set of walls. Home becomes a feeling you get in places that feel good. In that sense, I enjoy this article, and the argument it brings: home is an idea.
So, returning to my lament, considering the fact that ‘home’ is just an idea, and the fact that my heart is prancing about leaving me prey to loneliness and disillusionment, I can only conclude: I am stuck in between the walls of my all too familiar dwelling, in my all too familiar native country, wondering why it is so hard to get out of it again. Any ideas?
Yours sincerely,
Stef