The passage usually starts by the act of intentional casting off. You take a suitcase with bare necessities in it, but what you leave back is much more important. You abandon the comfort of your lingering blanket, the squeak of your particular plank of wood, a white noise of your own fridge. You leave behind the cozy familiarity of your morning routine and quick and ready communication with close people and the pleasant comfort of reassured orientation in those places that you know well. The seeking of comfort, of a solitary traveler, is a great paradox as it starts with the intentional acceptance of a complete lack of it. The initial hours in an unfamiliar city is a lesson on confusion. It smells differently, the light is at a different angle, and the concert of street sounds a local siren wailing differently than you have heard before, local people are speaking a different language, and that train is noise that you have never heard before. During these first moments, ease is long forgotten, a very far-away state. It is the feeling of being one vulnerable, unattached nerve-ending, raw and open to a world that is full of now new experience; it is at once frightening and exciting.
The initial hunger is always physical comfort, the only way to survive by means of shelter and warmth, which can immortalize you in the new reality. It is the quest of a temporary haven, a mere square inch of the globe you can call your own, at least briefly. The enchantment of having been alone in your room having passed the hurdle of arrival, is a universal tongue with travellers. It is that release of clicks of the lock, deep heavy sigh when the backpack is dropped on the ground, plainly closing the door to the rest of the world. How, in such tiny room of a sterile hotel room, cluttered hostel dormitory, or even in the spare room of a stranger, you can now and unload. You start to make a low-key ceremony to reclaim something, and you open up old book, an old t-shirt, the toothpaste tube. These are things that in their own homes are profane, but when brought to an unfamiliar land they are made sacred just like a flag stuck in the ground. This little ritual of clearing your space, is the beginning of clearing your mind, a haven to come out of and which you can go back to when you are tired.
After building a base, the second quest is a sustenance search, but it is not always related to hunger only. The initial supper abroad is a hunt after something hot, straightforward and soothing. It is not about culinary exploration and more like a form of self-comforting. Instead of hunting down the most exotic dish, you go over the menu to be able to recognize something edible there-a bowl of soup, a plate with pasta, some plain grilled fish on rice. Eating this meal, alone, most of the time in a corner of a small restaurant is a very down to earth experience. The food is hot and its coziness spreads all over your body like a welcome antidote to the cold strangeness of the city. It is a silent affirmation that one can take care of themselves and that you will find your way in this new world and that you will fulfill your own simple needs. It is so basic and life affirming that it is followed by the next powerful ritual, which is the first hot shower. Water that literally washes off the dirt of the airports and train station terminals is a breath taking metaphor, a washing away of the stress and fatigue of travel. You step out, refreshed and clean and you sense a slight change. The jolt of day to day life has been dulled down and a word of precarious comfort has ripened.
After the needs in this base are satisfied, the search of comfort shifts to rhythmic. Human soul needs routine, something that can be predicted, a structure within the chaos. With all the old routines thrown off, the solo traveler has to be a master architect of the new routines. This most usually starts with the morning coffee. You can use a whole day trying to discover a small local cafe and within the third day it is your cafe. Your name might not be known by the barista but a simple nod of familiarity will do. The sound of the espresso machine that you know well, the ideal weight of the ceramic cup that you hold in your hand, those ten minutes when you look outside the window, sipping and smelling the drink, become the solid points of reference with which you start every day. It is such a small, repetitive task, that it introduces a feeling of normalcy, a strand of predictability, which you can hang on to when getting ready to dive into the unknown. It is a modest statement that you are not merely a visitor that exists here, but someone who is playing a part in the everyday life of here.
This is a rhythm which is created even in navigation. The map, which is the cause of the anxiety and a certain reference to your tourist status in the beginning, gradually translates into the source of power. The initial couple of days are spent with your face in it, and fingers making tracings, getting a little stab of terror at each corner you have never seen before. However, slowly but surely the map of the city starts to leave its mark in your mind. Roads are known, places are known ones. Then is a day of triumph to go walking out of your room into a museum or into a park and then find the way without the map at all, only depending upon the inner compass opening up in your own heart. Such familiarity with the geography of a city will usefully serve as a source of reassurance. The sense of disorientation is turned into feeling of belonging, the confidence that you know the space you are in. The city is no longer a maze; it has been transformed into a place you may look forward to get around in and it is no longer because you are just drifting, but it is because you are headed somewhere.
With the progress of days, the process of being comforted steps into the emotional sphere that is inhabited by the constant presence of loneliness. The person who travels alone discovers how to comfort himself in a notion which could be termed as anonymous togetherness. It is the easiness of being the only person sitting in a crowded bus, reading a book in the noisy park on the city, or strolling around in a museum with hundreds of other people around you. These are times when you are a lone person though not in a vacuum. You are a part of the greater human ecosystem, getting an inaudible vibrancy between the assorted presence of others without the burden of heterotropic interaction. The relief in this is enormous. It enables you to have a sense of belonging in the human race all the time staying inside your bubble of self exploration. It is you who are the spectator in the great drama of life, a mute actor in this stage, and you can obtain in this state of things an abiding and imperturbable tranquility.
However sometimes solitude bubble must be burst. We might find our comfort in the tiniest human contact, the momentary encounters which only briefly break a day of solitude. It could also be a common laugh with a shopkeeper as he and you both get lost on the language barrier. It may be five minutes sharing life with some other traveler in a hostel kitchen and talking about the places you have visited and where she/he is going. It may be the caring nature of an old lady who notices you are lost, with evidence and a pleasant smile, she directs you to the right path. These are the little, life giving flares. They are free, they imply nothing, but they remind of mutual generosity, and the togetherness. They tell you that you are not invisible, that you have been seen and that a helping hand or a stroke of grace is not very distant. This is the reassurance of the fact that despite the feeling that you are on your own you are not all alone in the world.
As the long and wavy search culminates, it is able to silently unveil one of the greatest revelations of life, the comfort that you have been seeking all the time was never in a particular place, a particular food or another person. Outward journey was a journey into. What is found on the road is the actual comfort to be found in independence. It is the unshakable confidence gained in the flames of the near miss trains, the language goof ups that you can cope with uncertainty. It is that kind of contentment in knowing you may meet the world with nothing but your ingenuity and your ability to find your way through sheer wits and want not only live, but make things right. The comfort you got is the comfort of your company, the fact that you can be an interesting, tough and funny person to be around. When you end up listening to yourself, when you trust yourself, when you appreciate the plain and the silent joy of your own presence, then you begin to understand what listening and trusting yourself is.
You come back home as a different person with new and mobile form of comfort within you. It is the security of flexibility, the assured sense that you can shape a life, a regimen, some bit of serenity of your own creation anywhere in the world. The things that are used to keep you at home are exhilarating, but are not needed anymore to keep you healthy. The most valuable thing that the solo traveler who was searching found out is that home is not a point on a map. It is condition of being, a wordly retreat of strength and understanding to oneself, which once constructed can never be abandoned. The search climaxes in knowing that you have never been on the quest of finding a comfortable place, but what you have been in search of is how to become a comfortable individual, one that goes along well with the world and most importantly himself or herself.
The pilgrimage to self-discovery is the path that the solo traveler treads to bring him or herself comfort in the self, and after such foundation of self-reliance is laid, a fresh and more intricate voyage may commence. When the initial scramble to survive is substituted to the calm self-assurance, the traveler will learn to cast his or her gaze beyond the rudimentary needs of housing and nourishment. Ease is no longer a locked door or a hot meal, but a certain quality which can be enjoyed at the most unanticipated locations. You start realizing that the world presents an enormous and diverse menu of consolation, and you are now free and able to pursue it. The chapter that follows is not of the wall-building against the world, but of getting on into the secret recesses into which we must fly to be safe, which were there all the time, and waiting to be discovered by those who had the lean persistence to seek out.
Many times this quest takes you out of the urban areas where there is the noise of human presence into the magnificent quiet cathedrals of nature. This is a specific and deep satisfaction that is to be had in the very magnitude of nature, the view changing sort of relief that cannot be had in any city, and it reflects only when the magnitude is seen. On top of some snow-capt mountain, or on the seashore of some great, heaving ocean, the anxieties and cares of the day are all of a sudden as nothing to you. The age and immobility of the mountain side, the eternal movement of the sea breathing in and out reminds you of the transient pre-occupations of your own life. This is the rest of being humbled, of making ourselves small but in an emancipatory manner, not a degrading one but one that frees you finally of the dead lead of your own ego. Against such profundity the internal banter subsides and leaves a mere feeling of amazement.
This innate rest one may also observe in motion, in the monotonous ease of such an occupation as walking a path. It doesn t matter whether it is a coastal trail in Portugal with the smell of the sea in the air or a forest trail in Germany where a green canopy of the tree filters light the rhythm of hiking can be a strong meditation. that restless, scheming focus of the mind in the city, plans and observations, have to be narrowed down to one point at a time: to the next step, to the placing of a foot on uneven ground, to the drawing of a breath. This body attention relaxes the nervous system. The only things heard are crunching of your boots on the trail, the rustling of leaves in the wind and the call of a far bird. It is a peeling off of the unnecessary, a loss of a civilized state and into a more primitive existence of motion and consciousness. Comfort is articulated in a way that is not soft, not cozy, but clear, fresh and defining the mind, a refreshment of mind that renders someone feeling the mind is fine and well-aligned to the own body.
The experience is a deep experience of the senses as well. It is the sensation of the fresh air which fills your lungs after days when you have to breathe the city smog. It is the smell of wet soil and rotting leaves, a luxurious perfume of the type that celebrates life and the rejuvenation of life. It is the easy physical one of dipping your hands into a refreshingly cold mountain brook or settling down in a sun-heated field and grass to rest a few minutes. These are primeval comforts, clear identification with the earth that go past the mind and straight to the flesh. To the individual who has spent weeks learning to read the complicated social cues, the waves of city and town life, to realize the sheer, plain reaction of the natural world can mean an actual homecoming, a touch of the far-reaching and far more ancient place of belonging.
I can also find a distinct flavour of time in the still sacred corridors of galleries and museums. More than a retreat to get out of the rain, or a way of killing yet another afternoon, such institutions provide a continuity with the great (and uninterrupted) chain of human events. Being a solo traveller, you have time on your hands: you can stand before a single picture some twenty minutes without being interrupted. You can look into an eye of a portrait, that is painted 400 years ago and see a glimpse of a feeling you can identify yourself with- pride, sadness, uncertainty. You may study an ancient bit of pottery, wonder over the hands that made it, the hands that are exactly the same as yours. Of common humanity through the ages this is the comfort. It is the moment when you find out that your problems, your happiness are not something fresh. They belong to an eternal form, and in this perceive your own loneliness as less an isolation and more an element of an immense, long-term process.
The feeling is enhanced in the quiet, hushed up presence of libraries and antique bookstores. I was happy to be alone in so happy a place. Even the very air is strange, heavy with the light, sweet odour of old paper and old printing. And you may touch with your fingers the heads of a thousand books, and each book is a window opening upon another mind, another world, another time. It is comforting to have so many stories, so much knowledge and imaginations collected around you. It sets in a low buzz that you are in on a great discussion. You can also take out a chance book off of a shelf, you get into an old, battered arm chair with dust gathered into the corner of the room and suddenly you are lifted up. Being in a constant motion, a library can be a very strong anchor in the life of a traveler, a home to a distracted mind.
Even music is an effective and direct means of consolation, that is, without language and culture. The solo-traveler is the only one in a unique position to stumble across these moments of unanticipated grace. It may be a solo cellist playing Bach in a large and echoing subway, and they pierce the flow of the crowd with their lovely, sad music. It may be the memory of walking into the back of some old historic church to get out of the cold on an autumn day, and stumbling upon some choir practicing a service and hearing them fill the big old building with their music. These are not time scheduled performances; but chance occurrences of beauty. They do not require you to do anything, only to listen to them. It carries you along in the music, with a direct emotional circuit-breaker, a flash of pure emotion that can be a sort of catharsis, an anti-anxiety release, and you get it with no word at all rolling off your tongue.
We live in the era of comfort crusade, and in this era, the comfort is made difficult and is improved by the virtual world people carry in their pockets. The smartphone is a contradictory tool of the traveling alone. On the one hand it is life-saving, something to die of. Knowing that it is possible to send a quick note to a friend at home, share a photo of a beautiful sunset or have a brief video call and see a familiar and smiling face can become a strong remedy to the instant feeling of emptiness and solitude. It is even a temporal connection to your support system and that even when you are alone physically, you are still connected to your support. Being in a weird hotel room at night, the possibility to download and watch a favourite film or listen to an acquainted album may form a little, digital hearth, a sphere of familiarity in the sea of novelties.
Conversely, the most soothing that the device can provide is by simply not using it. There is something almost luxury-esque about the conscious effort to turn it off into airplane mode, place it somewhere in your bag and follow your gut and observation, which is exactly what you are doing for a day. The ease of deciding to be all there, of liberating the mind to the incessant set of a notifications and the low-level stress of digital attachment. That way you will be more open to the world you live in and be open to the serendipitous moments and little meditations that solo travel is so gratifying. The solo traveler who gets really comfortable gets good at using this device smartly, as a way to lessen the distance between her and another person (or people), but also understands that, sometimes, it is necessary to drop it and clear away the distractions so that he or she can revel in the comfort of silence and being alone.
In the end, the veteran solo traveler discovers purpose can be used to create comfort as well. You do not just observe a culture, but you can be part of it. Taking cooking classes is one of the reasons to gain an experience, rather than merely a delicious meal. It has a structured, focused activity that is a pleasant relief after the days of wandering without any structure. Working together towards a common goal of making a food and being in the act of using your hands to do an activity is grounding in its own sense as well as creating a simple camaraderie with your classmates. It would be a great fulfillment knowing that you had learned a new thing and you are proud to have achieved this and this is one of the richness in your journey. Not only you leave with a satisfied belly, but also with a new recipe, a new story and a tactile experience of local culture, which is awfully good and more long-lasting than food itself.
