Last Updated on August 13, 2019 by Larissa
Are you here or are you there? The answer depends on if you are a traveler or not.
One of the interesting things about taking a year to travel is the response you get from the people you tell about your trip. Reactions tend to fall into two different camps: those who want to crawl into your suitcase and go with you and those who ask what you’re going to do with all your stuff at home.
If you are reading this post chances are pretty good you’re of the crawl-into-our-suitcase variety. Mention of travel immediately has you thinking of faraway places, mentally locating your passport and itching to hit the road. Even if you’re an armchair traveler, you’re doing the same thing. You gobble up books (and blog posts) about strange and wonderful destinations, and the Amazing Race is your favorite TV shows (it is mine!)
The thought of how you are going to handle whatever exists of your life back home is merely a pesky detail. The objective after all is the journey. You are thinking about the there. The stuff you leave behind will get sorted out somehow. . .but enough about all that—you’ve got a plane to catch!
The flip side of this thinking is the folks who are focused on the here. For them, travel is something that takes them away from home, away from their routine, away from their stuff. They are the ones who are not particularly interested in the journey, but are fascinated by the process of putting our life on hold just to take a trip. They drill down to the mundane details of everyday life: What will you do with your mail? How about your house? Aren’t you going to miss the Super Bowl/World Series, etc? How long will you be away from home? (As opposed to “how long will you be traveling?”) And they rarely ask “where are you going?”–a major differentiator if there ever was one.
It has been interesting to see these different perspectives emerge among our friends and colleagues. Certainly a long journey such as this one requires a fair amount of planning, and there are also many home-based details to address. We will discuss them at various points on this site since they are a necessary evil, and it’s important to help our fellow travelers get on the road as quickly as possible.
Because right now you might be living in the here, but we know you want to get to there. . .
