On International Travel:

In my life, I have traveled internationally three times. In 2010, I went to Jamaica and Mexico, and then, this summer, I went to Austria, Italy, and Switzerland. I know I haven’t seen a lot compared to many of my contemporaries, but I’ve traveled enough to get a feel for the routine of it.

I think that international travel is important, and I’m grateful for my experiences. I think it broadens your horizons, and makes you rethink your position in the world, and blah, blah, blah.  But I’m not sure if I can honestly say that I think that international travel is fun. 

I know kids who can’t seem to stay in the country. The minute they return from a trip, they are planning to go somewhere else, and they are having a great time. I don’t understand these kids, because when I returned from Europe, I didn’t even want to leave my house for like two months. 

I think that what makes international travel so overwhelming/exhausting/arduous for me is that it puts my life all out of context.

Let me explain: When I’m wandering around a foreign country either with one other person I know well (as I was in Europe and Jamaica) or with a group of people I don’t know at all (as I was in Mexico), all the little routines, sights, sounds, and interactions that give me meaning are gone. It makes me panic sometimes, especially when I’m mostly alone, thousands of miles away from anything familiar, looking at something really really beautiful. I look at the beautiful thing, e.g. vineyards in the Adige Valley:

an alpine lake:

or cenotes in the Yucatan:

And I feel overwhelmingly terrible because the beautiful thing is so irrelevant to my life. And also, I think, because it represents enormous spans of time, and because it reminds me that I have no control over anything. And also maybe because I’m sad to know that none of it, not even enormous mountains, are permanent.

Another psychologically challenging aspect of stopping through all these cool places for weeks or months is realizing that random chance plops people down in their specific circumstances. And realizing that the fact that I took my first breath in a hospital in rural southern West Virginia meant that I would never grow up in Viennese row house, or ride my bike to school through a cobblestone piazza in northern Italy, or live in a corrugated tin house just feet above the Caribbean, or be trilingual, or, or, or…claim any number of alternative realities as my life. It’s not so much that I feel cheated by my own geographical circumstances—obviously there are worse lives to be born into than small town, middle class, American ones—it’s more that travel brings to the forefront of my mind how arbitrary it is, and it makes me think of the infinite alternatives.

It may sound like my negativity is causing me to fail to appreciate the beauty that I have had the privilege to witness, but I want to make it clear that I really do appreciate and fully grasp the profundity of my travel experiences. It’s just that travel seems to affect me differently than it affects most people.

For one thing, it makes me appreciate coming home to my little town where I am not irrelevant—my own arbitrary reality—where my daily routine is predicable, where I am confident that I will be able to order a water correctly, where the beauty is maybe smaller and less grand but is definitely easier to stomach. Back to my small reality where am I not constantly being assaulted by the infinite, because the infinite is hidden behind the merciful mask of the day-to-day.