. . . ever leaving . . .

Your first discovery when you travel is that you do not exist.

-Elizabeth Hardwick



When you return to Cambridge in early August after three weeks in Asia, you discover that


a) it is already Fall
b) there are indeed sharks around the Cape
c) everything is where you left it


For better, and worse - the tiny lavender unmatched sock that fell out of the laundry basket, the full rack of drying dishes, the bank statements you still don't know how to file, and the mental lists you made of the insurmountable tasks you identified and created a long time ago. You slip back into the rhythms effortlessly, even though your recent memory finds it strange you're no longer doing just one thing at a time: letting your 3-year old try on her nth pair of shoes in Singapore's ubiquitous malls, queuing for the metro in the angled spots designated with thick red tape -- standing on the shore of Berawa Beach with your surfboard under your right arm, or slapping mosquitoes onto the wall as you get ready for bed each night.

I forgot I missed the clarity that follows simplicity, and that leaving home means your regular entanglements are stripped away. You carry with you only what you brought and what you really need, although the two don't always line up. But your bags get smaller and your phone doesn't ring. The lessening of things.

Sadly, I was also reminded that I didn't necessarily have fewer thoughts. Thich Nhat Hanh in The Art of Power recommends just drinking your tea (not your projects, your worries, your plans). I've traveled all my life, and I've always believed that this exercise is easier when you're on the road. I think this may have been the first time I really turned over that assumption in my mind, spurred by my own evidence and experience. Can you really sit in a space that's emptier - or do you rush to fill it up? Mary Maddux of Meditation Oasis asks what's happening now? Embarrassing to admit how often I cannot answer that question, even in the face of new weather and smells and languages and routines. How often I thought of what had happened in Cambridge, or what might happen in Bali, while crossing the buzzing and ordered and well-kept roads of the Lion City.


~ ~ ~


Despite their escapist nature, two books reduced the world to pages and lines at every free moment: The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman, and The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Both came to me by chance, both told of our barest, bravest selves in the practice of survival, both revealed some of the most honest insights about love that I've ever read.

Singapore's meatiest veins seem hidden to me; I still cannot figure out what to do with myself there, beyond the requisite kid-friendly assortment of museums and zoos and parks. So my books provided an aspect of incident and adventure I thought I wanted. The beginning of the crumbling of my walls of assumptions.
I can just kill time 'til we get to Bali, I thought... until our idyllic tropical ocean experience will be perfect and harmonious and light.

Of course the day we arrive in Bali, the ocean is roiling and messy and far over our heads. The winds from the Southeast are blowing at around 21 miles an hour, and just paddling out to the break was challenge enough. No one told me Bali brings a little of the crazy. Juxtaposed, of course, with thousands of black-blown temples and verdant rice paddies and easy smiles are floods of motorbikes on narrow roads with no sidewalks, 13-foot waves that come out of nowhere, monkeys that attack you for your flip-flops, projectile vomit and dengue fever-laden skeeters. Would our expectations have changed if someone had alerted us to those possibilities? Or would we just see what we wanted to see, an oasis nestled in the dunes of our stresses and fears and long-constructed fantasies?


~ ~ ~


There's a passage in the dystopian Dog Stars about a character's desires that predated the central apocalypse. She remembered wanting a baby so desperately, and the waiting. Living her life, but always seeing the baby at the end of the equation "it'll-be-better-when". And that really struck me. The waiting we do every day, for a less stressful moment, for an event or object or person that will make us happy - the waiting we do over many months of planning and hoping, not needing to be content or relaxed "until" we get to our elsewhere. And we get to our elsewhere, we find we have new expectations, new needs, new desires. We wait for a train that comes and goes, and even when we get on it, we barely notice we are moving.

I agree w/Ms. Hardwick: when you travel, you inevitably find out that you are nothing. All the responsibilities and labels and commitments and story lines and definitions of you are suspended in another ether. The you that is inviolate survives without the wardrobe of familiarity, which is simultaneously reassuring and terrifying. I would only add after this journey that everything is everything. There is beauty and trauma and serenity and chaos in every situation; we wait for purely fictional situations that won't challenge us to remain in this world and learn something new. If neither the past, nor the future, neither memory nor assumption is real, the only thing that remains is the moment.

Someday I will remember that we don't need to go anywhere to discover this, that the present moment is the only thing that really connects us to life. We feel ecstatic, we feel destroyed, we feel like we can't wait 'til everything changes, and everything changes. Then we return, and take a breath in, and let it all go.