We are one month, or three months, or fifteen months into our adventure now, depending where you cut it. Most recently we are six weeks gone from Portland, where we departed to a rainstorm after three weeks of beautiful sunshiny weather. We are also six weeks away from a washing machine that gloriously cleaned our clothes for us, with directions on how to do so in English, so for now I feel six weeks away from home.
People often ask, and I often ask myself- what is it like to be traveling? And I’m never quite sure how to answer the question. Do people want to hear that the island of Phu Quoc, in Vietnam, is one of the most beautiful and tranquil places I’ve ever been. That Angkor Wat was underwhelming to me but Jason thought it was tres, tres bien. That the aesthetics of Japan- the architecture, textiles and ceramics- made me fall all over myself with consumer desire. Visiting Hong Kong and its millions of people was like visiting another planet I hardly knew existed, filled with so many skyscrapers it made Portland look like a cute rural town.
Traveling is also me still being me, just in different countries. I still experience deep and uncontrollable hanger when I have gone too long without eating, Jason and I still quibble over normal things partners quibble over, it is just now related to the laundry we are hand washing in the sink instead of the laundry we were machine washing in our basement. I don’t know if sharing these normal parts of life with others elicits a response of ‘oh good, your life is normal too like mine’ or if it is more of a ‘how silly to be hangry during the times you are getting to have, you are wasting such a gift.’ Maybe both are true.
I don’t want to downplay, or up-play, what it has been like for us to live out of our backpacks for the past three months, and outside of our house and away from family and friends for the last fifteen. And I’m not sure which way of talking about it does which. It is a challenge in this phase of life, as it is in any, to hold up the things that are really really good, to let in the things that are not so good and to sit with all that we do and do not have, all at the same time.
This is, without much doubt, the year I will sleep the most in my adult life. Where I will smile and nod and order, believing that I am happy with whatever comes out of the kitchen (because it’s fun!) but really I will not think the thing that is some unrecognizable meat that smells like it has been dead too long is fun at all. Where I will see more new countries, hear more foreign languages, and sleep in more different beds than any other year of my life.
Sometimes I feel pressure to feel the cumulative joy of what this time in my life is, to soak it all in as the big picture I am experiencing. Because I feel it as the small picture, as each individual moment of joy, hanger, adventure, discovery, bad sleep, delicious breakfast, beautiful monument and cup-of-instant-noodles-because-we-are-way-over budget-today. I’m trying daily to connect the small joys to the big joys, which it turns out is not so different than my life at home was. I’m just getting the privilege now of doing it in lands that are new to me.
