Written in September 2021.
I’m planning a trip overseas again.
Finally, after over eighteen months of being grounded in the UK, I get to return to my beloved Europe.
The years of 2020 and 2021 have been largely taken from those of us who live by the low-cost airline carrier. Maybe not 2020 in its entirety. We did do a month of Spain in January 2020 before the world went into crisis mode. And I did manage to revisit America, including New York, twice, Boston and Florida before the chaos started. And I managed to visit France, twice.
In hindsight I should be so lucky.
And now, after being grounded in the UK and working a job completely out of my interest, we are finally going back to Europe. The Czech Republic awaits us and now I have to remember how to travel again.
For I have become use to staying in one spot again, albeit without my free will being involved.
How does one travel again after all that has happened? What has changed? Are these changes fixed and unalterable now?
And what happens when we want to travel again?
I immensely dislike the idea of being trapped on the ground, like the rest of them. The need to get out there again is driving me to find a renewed purpose in life.
And again, I must practice gratitude. The gratitude that I have done what I wanted to do in my twenties. I obsessed over the idea of needing to see as much as I could. The desire to get out in the world and leave a mark.
Yesterday, a twenty-one-year-old at work told me that he would call it a win; accomplishing what I have done in my short life. And that helped, given that the urge to compare ourselves to others is often toxic. The idea of missing out sometimes fills my mind.
Not unlike the trauma I experienced after university. The directionless mode I fell into and the feeling of “and now what man?” a feeling I get every so often when one era comes to an end and another must take its place.
And now life must go on, the need to find the next thing to do. I keep reminding myself that right now, I’m living day-to-day in the presence moment. And that I am not directionless.
Being around the right people helps. One thing I have learnt over and over is the need to surround yourself with people that get you. That is what helps me on a daily basis right now, after watching Covid-19 destroy the thing we love. The tragedy of what happened is such – not only was our home destroyed -our entire world went down in flames.
And now from the ashes of that old world, do we now start reclaiming our lives and rebuilding our world. This has become our focus.