Why I travel

Jamie Ehrenfeld
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

Processing an overactive mind in South Africa.
Listening to: https://open.spotify.com/album/1J6diyoZeWWH7VmvkhIPeS

I travel to remind myself to live in a constant state of wonder around what is possible: a state of openness, learning, and evolution. In this journey to Cape Town, I’ve placed myself somewhere brand new to me: full with histories, traditions, contexts beyond my own realms of comprehension. It’s here I am called upon to embrace vulnerability, uncertainty, and adventure. It’s here I shed the versions of myself stuck in previous iterations of identity, iterations of identity that no longer serve me. With no presuppositions of who I am, travel empowers me to continue boldly with an eternal process of discovery.

My reflective, introspective, inquiring thoughts, while not new or unusual for me, insisted with their sheer mass that I write. I spent the afternoon ‘getting lost’ — wandering through Cape Town with the goal of acquiring a notebook to house some of these overwhelming thoughts. I ultimately found much more, welcoming the experience of ‘getting lost’ in a bookstore, filled with a mixture of school supplies, study guides, local and international bestsellers, travel guides, cookbooks, and textbooks.

I have forgotten how I have loved books. I feel faint familiarity at best with the preteen spending hours in the John Jermain Library while living with her grandmother and aunt during school holidays. With a short and trying attention span and a gravitation toward whatever external validation I could see, I lost sight of the love and valuing of books I grew up with. As technology and digital media developed, I read blogs and op-eds, entered the virtual reality of the Nintendo and Playstation, and barely recognized the 11 year old poring through, though not comprehending in its fullness, To Kill a Mockingbird.

And today, after several days pondering my role and existence in this space, so far from home but riddled with parallels and similarities I cannot ignore, I find myself peacefully emptying my wallet in exchange for Migrations: New Short Fiction from Africa, New Voices in Psychology: Victimology in South Africa (research unpacking impacts of oppression through the lens of Ubuntu and restorative justice), and The Other Side of Freedom: Stories of Hope and Loss in the South African liberation struggle 1950–1994.

And as I sit writing, I observe my fear of not completing these books, and remember my intention of listening to myself and welcoming my process of becoming and evolving as a fluid, yet grounded self. This intention empowers me to exchange this fear for the truth that I hold the capacity to make good on the things that matter to me, given that I listen to myself to discern what they are: listening often, with forgiveness and acceptance, but without complacency.

I have spent almost twenty-five years listening, and for most of that time I valued the voices I heard outside myself at the expense of my own. I found my own voice folding into itself, riding a hamster-wheel-roller-coaster of uncertainty that has only compounded as my understandings of life’s complexities have evolved. I have been blessed with some of the most beautiful, enlivening entities around me, and I now find myself at a point where I must fill the self in order to attain peace and sense around such powerful creative energies and entities.

So I immerse myself in a new environment to remember how to hold firm to wonder; to ground myself in an intentionally fluid, evolving understanding of how to listen and process all I encounter, and how to follow my own lead down a path of curiosity as it unfolds toward a more vibrantly human existence.

I travel to remember who I am.

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seeking clarity, balance, fulfillment, and love.

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