Travel Blog Exchange

Nostalgic Baggage: Taking Love With You

There's so much talk of movement these days, the advice on everyone's lips. Personally I'm charmed by the elegant momentum of agile living. A young woman posed a question at TravelBlogExchange this month, asking round-the-world travelers and serial expats how they face their homesickness. She wants to be an expat one day soon, she wrote, but how can she leave her family and everything she knows?

Being abroad for long stretches -- some of us looking at forever -- sure we get homesick, I told her.

But it’s actually deeper than that. With each passing day the things we miss change and we end up pining for something that no longer exists. The more we move around, the less home is one place. A bittersweet price of going out into the world. What you gain is a new way of seeing yourself, your family, your home, your nation, the planet.

It's quite possible all of us -- from the young woman whose family and current surroundings define her world to long-term travelers toughened by life on the road -- are so enamored with our present reality (good, bad or indifferent) we're reluctant to let go for something that will stretch us past our idea of ourselves.

That future-travel-blogger may yearn for a wider experience, but in a few words she expressed a poignant desire to stay right where she was. At least for now.

If each tiny, agile step is a shift away from something else -- guaranteed not to be there forever, trustily waiting for our return-- we need to consider with extra care where we are headed and when we choose to go.

How do you keep what you love in your life as you move forward?

Mastodon