The Thing About Travelling

Madeleine Knight
Sep 17, 2015
2 min read

One of the many things about travelling is that if you go alone you’re meant to ‘find yourself’ and you’re likely to find meet 1000s of other travellers more so than if you travel with a friend or in a couple. But when you go home - which inevitably you’ll do eventually, whether in a few weeks, months or years - you’ll get back and remember everyone else’s lives have actually carried on…. People have moved, got married, had kids, died…. And you’ll talk about your adventures as they talk about their new car or their up and coming pay rise, and you’ll both be very interested in each others tales for a while.

But after a while, their lives keep moving on, their pay rise comes, their child is born, their wedding day comes around… and the next step is already in place before the current one has even begun to play out. And they’re excited, and tired, but excited. And you’re happy for them. But then, they ask how you are and what you’re doing and what’s next for you and you have very little idea…

You had plans, you have tried some things out, you’ve thought about settling down, you even met a guy…. Then it all gets too real, or, you spend a week solid in your pyjamas on the sofa watching Friends re-runs and drinking wine with your parents as you can’t afford to live anywhere but your parents because you don’t have a stable income and so can’t afford a car let alone get a mortgage… And you find yourself wondering, where next? What now? How? When? And there are no answers.

Settling down doesn’t appeal as much as seeing the world. Seeing the world doesn’t appeal as much as settling down. One day you think the comfortability of home is the best thing ever, the next you feel suffocated by your house/lack of money/routine. The social pressures of falling into the routine you should complete to have succeeded at life start to become intense and by this point you’ve spent enough time in one place to last you months…

And you go again.

Wherever you feel… Or wherever your current bank balance will allow you to go for as long as it allows you. And you find a way it’ll work. You convince family and friends this is ‘just something you have to do’ and they give each other worried looks of ‘here we go again’… and off you go.

And you start the whole process all over again.

And so is life.