Travel: The Act of Change
What do we do with change? Is it something we shy away from? Something we run from or avoid at all costs? Or is it, perhaps, life’s great reminder that everything is transient, everything is precious?
Months ago, I found out my plans for this year had been changed dramatically. Instead of going back to England for a publishing program in Oxford, I would instead be taking a gap year due to COVID complications that delayed the program and effectively put my career on hold. My first instinct was shock and confusion. This change was so unexpected that I wasn’t even sure how to react. Yet, as I started to consider the implications of a gap year, I began to lean into this change. Suddenly, I was gifted time to pursue other passions. It was as if the universe was reminding me there was more to life than just my career.
These days, I’m finding myself fascinated by transience. With a year’s worth of travel, freedom, blogging, meeting new people, making art, and experiencing new things, everything feels temporary, everything is precious. This is life “on the road” so to speak. And even in moments when I am physically stationary, living at home or with a friend, I find that things keep changing. I find that I identify with Jon Krakauer, Elizabeth Gilbert, Walt Whitman, Cheryl Strayed, and Jack Kerouac–poets of the road. For many of these writers, the open road calls to them; the journey beckons as they grapple with their self definition or with dull lives that seem to be taking them nowhere. Travel, the art of change, takes them from this stagnation. Travel moves them, like a river, towards an ocean of rebirth.
All of this has brought me to do the same. I’ve finally flown the coop. Taken off for Oregon and the roads I’ve never traveled. Why Oregon, you may ask? The destination, in some ways, is less important. I came to visit a good friend, but I left to do some soul searching, to find meaning in this year, to seek, question, discover what could not be found in my own backyard.
And I am at a point in my life where my ideas of things are changing. As my inner world changes, I find the desire for travel becomes nearly unbearable. To move, to change, to match the physical experience of transience and transformation to the inner world of mental shifting and personal growth inward: this is what I crave. Mirroring my inner change, travel becomes the obvious act of movement through the physical manifestation of life as it is lived and experienced. And as I shift my location, the change aligns with my inner world and I am soothed by this.
Oregon, thus far, is everything I had hoped for. It represents new fronts unexplored, new connections not yet made, new experiences, and a wonderful sense of finding myself in a place I had never been to before. For me, the road has proved gratifying and the change pleasurable in every sense. More on Oregon to come soon.
Authentically yours,
Caroline