What I can imagine is what you are thinking. You see me wandering in a strange city, all alone, all exposed and defenceless, a target of every conceivable harm. You have a deep, sincere and very moving concern creased in your brow that is positively confining, I suppose, however, in its purely honest sincerity, it is a little stifling. You have shot question after question at me, all meant in a kindly way, and which had only one purport–that you wished me to think better of this foolish experiment. You are alone? Is that safe! will you be lonely? What should be the case in case something occurs?” These are the questions, my dear friends, which has moved me to write this, to fill the abyss between your fond concern and my intuitive, instinctive, insatiable urge to undertake this pilgrimage, this journey of one who travels alone but finds himself no longer content with that, but also must take this step because it is now, no longer a want, but a necessity to my soul.
I just want to say that I understand what you say. I do so indeed. Your fears are not wrong, they are done in the state of love and protectiveness that I cherish more than you realize. It would not be wrong to say, that the real world can be a scary place at times and the thought of exploring all these twists and turns without someone you know remains very close to home is rather terrifying. you imagine me sitting down to table alone night after night, a singleton surrounded by rapturing parties, or an unattached creature haunting populous thoroughfares where no one would have a laugh or a stare with me. You fear even the logistics, here is a stolen purse, a missed train a sudden illness in a foreign country where I do not speak the language. All these are sober also, ghosts which somewhere have hovered over my mind. But to permit these fears, to hem me in on the well known, the easy, the comfortable, and to make the desires that stretched beyond them, but which were capable of great joy and great success, so impossible to me as they could ever be so unless the recital of this dream that had been so happy and so good bore witness to me, this would be a far greater tragedy than the mischances which your imagination so rashly anticipates.
No this is not a flight either from you or my existence here. It is, actually, a self-journey. My sense of self has been connected with others to the extent that to be so long I am a friend, a daughter, a colleague. There is a certain sweetness and deliciousness about these functions but they, concomitantly, make a harsh sort of tinkling which can silence the softer wordings of self. To go alone is to come into possession of these outside names, it is to find oneself in silent fellowship with oneself. It is the chance to do something without asking any questions of myself, without thinking twice, or making compromises. And whether I would like to spend a whole day in one and the same museum, lost in the strokes of dead people, that is possible. When I get some mysterious urge to turn down a dusty, forgotten side street I can do so without having to explain why I detoured. This purity of freedom has got nothing to do with selfishness but of self exploration. It is about learning how to trust myself, it is about trying to be independent and it is about how to love being alone.
You are concerned whether I am safe and I love it. However please understand that I am not going into this blind. I have read thousands of books and articles about my destination, I have learnt about its culture, its customs, and about its dangers. I am fortified with knowledge, with common sense and with a liberal amount of caution. I will provide you with my itinerary, contact you regularly and have my emergency numbers prepared. I have taken travel insurance, and I also have backup of all my important documents. To a great extent, the ability to travel alone requires being more aware, which can literally keep a person safe. It is easy to get careless when you are in a group to lower your defenses. When you are alone, the senses are stimulated. You act more sensitive towards the surrounding and surroundings experience, you have more awareness of what people do around you and about you. The thing is not that a single traveler is a target; most of the time they are the most attentive one in the room.
and where shall be the loneliness thou dost so fear for me? It is a good point, but I will request you to look at a difference between loneliness and alone. There is nobody who has not experienced being lonely in a crowded room, a loss of contact that has absolutely nothing to do with being far away from other people. However being alone is a rich and life-giving experience. It is a place to assess yourself, to be creative and to feel closer to the surrounding world. Not having to speak all the time, I will thus become predisposed to appreciate the cacophony of sounds on a busy city corner, the fine nuances of architecture of a historical structure, the subtle tastes of a home-style meal. I will be more aware and active observer of life. What is more, traveling alone does not imply that one is constantly alone. Actually, it usually results in more real and true relationships. When you are among the two or a group you are a fortified entity. There is an increased approachability when you are alone. Locals are more prone to start a chat, to make a suggestion or to tell a story. Fellow travelers are more likely to invite you to sit down to eat or to go out somewhere. I will expect those evenings in noisy hostels, telling stories to other people, representing all sides of the world, and afternoons in silent cafes where I will feel a community with other lonely individuals who are also on their way to self-exploration. I am going on my own, yet I am feeling that I will hardly be alone.
It is also a venture of self-definition, of a stretch in the limits of my comfort zone. I have been living too long behind the known, the comfort zone. Routine has got some security in it but it has got no growth. Crossing over a busy road with a foreign bus system, trying to negotiate a price in a crowded market, placing a food order in a language in which I am only mildly proficient are some of the minor triumphs that compose a long-lasting and very deep sense of self-competence. They are the times that will peel away the lesser motives of self doubt and bring out a strength, resourcefulness, in myself that I might not even be aware I have. I do not intend to return home after this trip only with a pile of photographs and souvenirs, but some changed vision about how much I can manage, some confidence in the background that life will deal with me no matter what.
Consider the adventures I will be able to boast, the experiences that are going to enlighten my worldview and deepen my insights into the world. I am not just going to be visiting new places, but plunging myself in them. I will be introduced to the way of doing things other than mine, different values, and the way of seeing things. This can not be observed on a travel documentary or a guide book. It is a type of learning that one cannot get in any other other way but through immediate, uncompromised experience. And when I come back I will tell it all to you, the victories, the adventures, the times when you feel that you are looking straight up into the face of god, and the things that are funny in such a way that you never want to lose them. This period of separation will not make our friendship smaller; it will make it bigger because I shall have new ideas and new experience to share.
I know that you will think my wish to be alone seems queer to you,–maybe, ungrateful of your company. But I beg you to bear in mind that it is not pushing you away but it is pulling myself nearer to the person I am intended to be. Every person has his own way to move through this life, has his own mountains to scale. This is a hill that I need to tackle by myself. It is a holy journey not to a religious land, but to the inner world of my own self. It has to do with how to become my best friend, my chief and the constant source of reliability, my guide.
Then I urge you,–do not preoccupy yourself, believe. Faith in my ability to be a clever person and secure person and a tough person. You must trust that I have considered this, it is no foolish impulse, but a thoughtful, solemn and great matter in the course of my life. And above all, believe that it will not make me, in any respect, leave you farther away, only, make me more complete, more confident, and more interesting to be around by you guys. Come back when the dust of other islands beats on my shoes, and a new light in my eyes, and let me come back to you as not the person who left foolishly on a fools errand, but as the person who followed a call within and in so doing found a world larger and a self stronger then she ever dreamt there was. and perhaps (and perhaps) my tales may something inject into you, the desire of adventure.
The adventure that I would like to give you does not need to involve going online and reserving a flight to the most remote point on the earth. It is about having the realization that there is something adventurous in testing our own self limits, whatever they might be. In my case, at this moment, that frontier is a geographical one, a line on the map that I have a need to cross, on my own. In your case it may be registering to that pottery class you have always wanted to take, writing the first chapter of that book you have always dreamed about, or as simple as taking a different path home on the way back to work, to see your own town in a new light. In its most basic form, adventure is a choice to stop living within the routine of the ordinary and expose yourself to the unknown. It is just that my quest is a more concrete explanation of this human urge which can be found in every human being, the physical expression of an inner need to grow and to change, which I know is in you too.
And now a word or two about the idea of risk, which, so far as I can see, is the key to your anxiety. The view you have of risk is a solid something, a statistical likelihood that something will go bad. Mugged, in an accident, a scam. and you are not mistaken; there are those dangers. However, we are in a world where the illusion of control is at every corner and people tend to think that their comfort is synonymous with security. Those risks in life that make the headlines may not also be the greatest ones. The danger with staying still is massive, the danger of waking up in 10 years and finding that you have chosen to live in the dreggy-preconditioned-fear and find you live under the identical self-imposed restrictions. Regret is the danger, a silent and sulphuric acid which gnaws the soul more evil and more painfully than the greatest misfortune met on the road could ever do. What you do not know you can do is to my way of thinking the most frightening risk of all. Remaining in the cocoon of the comfort zone, we can end up never finding out that we have strong wings ourselves. I am an individual making a conscious decision to conquer the physical, calculable risks the road by moving around to avoid the spiritual and soul-breaking risk of having lived a half-life.
This walk is an intentional collision with the uncut reality. Once you travel along with a companion then it is always a mediated experience. You witness something beautiful like a beautiful sunset, the initial thought that comes to your mind is to turn to the friend and confirm the beauty to the friend to have your impressions confirmed. You find yourself in a tough scenario, and you are automatically in a joint problem solving phase. An underlying conversation appears on every moment. When I am not in the company of anyone, that filter is taken away. That sunset will be same, but I will be experiencing it silently, inside. Its beauty will be its communication with the sky and non-diluted by the need to come to agreement. What I will need when I am put into the clutches of a difficulty,–which I shall be,–the solution must come forth in my own brain, in my own heart, in my own ingenuity. It is this un moderate, un mitigated contact with the world that I desire. I want to see how I, me, to my own surprise, respond to something wonderful, to something frustrating, to something gracious, to something tragic. It is the final test of self-knowledge, a moment to look at my soul, in the cold hard light of a world that owes me nothing.
I think it is just natural that such a process results in a reset of values. The context is a well-engineered ecosystem of aims and aspirations that we have managed to develop around us at home and we are constantly measuring our achievements with the goals and aspirations that are frequently the culture we live in: the career we are pursuing, the materialistic things that we own and of course our social standings. This tide is very strong and it is easy to be carried away in it and think that this is what surrounds successful life everywhere. However, when you are in a village where the amount of happiness is not determined by how big a house is but by how strong the community bonds are or when you are in a conversation with a fellow traveler who has sacrificed a well-paid job in order to have time to explore the minimalist world, all this makes one wonder what success means to him or her. You start differing between what you are trained to desire and what you really need. I bet I will find my way back with a new (or altered) attitude towards the things which I call stuff, having a greater value to the non-material things that actually add a lot to our lives: which is sharing a meal with a stranger, a moment of deep silence in a natural cathedral, or a feeling of unadulterated, simple joy of being alive and healthy on a beautiful day. This is not a matter of negation but of affirmation, not of reducing our life here to nothing but a matter of adding to it, of focusing our attention on the matter of whether or not the ladder which we are all climbing is leaning against the right wall.
And what when things have gone wrong? They will do because. My train will take long, I will lose the way hopelessly, I will experience the pain of being cheated, I may even fall ill. I find these as do not go reasons. I perceive them as part and even part of the experience. It is during these frictions that the actual learning would occur. They are the unexpected, and Instagrammable-unworthy aspects of travel that obligate you to be imaginative problem-solver. Every small challenge that I conquer, acts as a credit in to my bank of self-sufficiency. Navigating around a subway system of a foreign city and having missed the last train is not a disaster; it is a real-time game that upon cracking, you feel in your ability to do anything. Pretending your way through a pharmacy to get pills to treat your headache is a minor win that amounts to a huge one. Those are the experiences that turn me into a traveler out of a tourist. A tourist is a consumer; a traveler an agent. I would like to become a traveller. I would not trade it, I want the grit and the struggle as much as the beauty and ease, because I know that my character is made out of the former, not the latter.
I would also like you to consider the effect this trip will bring to our friendship when I enter back in to the picture. You think it will make a sort of barrier between us, and my experiences will be so strange as that I would be quite unfitted to be of any kind of use to you in the life of ours together. In my opinion the contrary will be true. The individual returning to you will be more present and interested friend. When I learn to be really comfortable in my own company, I can fully interact with you out of abundance and not desperation. I will be happier and not dependent on external reactions to bring me joy, meaning that I will be more of an active listener, a more understanding source of support in your own paths. The ability to observe, to be very much in a moment that is a skill that I can bring to our conversations and our time, I will have learned that. Moreover, it will be a test of our friendship strength and stretchiness. To do that on your part to help me, to believe in me and my development even though it might be frightening at times, that is an act of love that will enhance our connection unlike any other alternative would have. It shows that we are not linked through convenience and nearness but by our sincerity of seeing each other become the best that we can be.
Well, there is always the blank question: What can you do in event of not loving it? What happens in case you arrive there and you are miserable and lonely and just want to go home? And when that occurs, then I will have got to understand a very deep thing about myself. I will have understood my boundaries. I will have known what makes me really comfortable and happy. Even a misfortunate trip is a lesson of invaluable dimension. Then liking it would be a disappointment, but not a regret. Regrets are created by the whatifs, by the paths not taken. Disappointment: this is when you come to some new activity, and it turns out not to be something you like. I would find it much more preferable to live with whatever the latter is. And in case I really get in trouble, I will have the strength and humility to alter my plans, or even go home. The aim of doing this is not to be stubbornly miserable in order to make a point. The thing is to make an attempt. The very act of such buying the ticket and stepping on the plane is, by itself, a success. It is an announcement, that my life belongs to me and that I am not afraid of trying something new.
Then how about the kind of stories I am coming home with? They will belong to me, in the sense that there could never be a shared experience. They will come into being in the cauldron of mine, unique perception. We shall have such things as characters in our lives, battles we fight, the faces that couple us with beauty to the point of tears–these will be chapters in our books, and we will speak in our own voices. And I will tell you of them, oh, I will! and I will be asking you to stay to dinner, not as a new man who has left you behind him, but as a fuller man, with a larger heart and a wider world to bring to you. It is not a breakaway in my life, but a step back into it. it is an act of great optimism, the belief that the world is more benevolent than it is terrifying, and that the people are far more delightful than terrible, and that I am far more able than I believe. Then pray, do me the honours of your love not in fear, but in faith. Trust me, trust the world, trust the long life of our friendship. Be waiting, and I will make good, the stories will be worth waiting on.
