Apr 24, 2020
12 — An odd species
“They are an odd species, whose anticipatory wandering seem more satisfying than their arrivals , and it may be that the whole purpose and pleasure of travel is simply not to be at home or to be in motion”. (Rebecca Solnit, A Book of Migrations (1997, revised version, 2011, Verso Books)
Rebecca Solnit was writing this about tourists, but she could have been writing about any of us. She could certainly have been writing about me but, now that being at home is the enforced norm, I am glad of it.
It’s an interesting question: why would I not want to be home? Why always in motion? When I set off most weeks on a Monday to go to work 200 miles away (and, yes, to see my granddaughters!), I justify these journeys by way of making a living and seeing family — but there has been, I have come to realise, a habitual, almost addictive anticipation about being in motion — about travelling away and returning.
And so, when I reflect on this travelling — often driving miles away — to events or to meetings, I am now asking myself, what this has been about? After all, I have often, like Solnit’s tourists, found the arrival less fulfilling than I imagined — and even the anticipation often carried a degree of anxiety.
I suspect that it is something to do with my response to validation — even a yearning for it. I thought perhaps I’d grown through this, but there is something humbling in realising that I may have not.
Now, isolated by the virus in the place I call home, the constellation of emotions and motivations are shifting. I feel the pull to be busily on-my-way less and less, and find the familiarity of each day’s rhythms and rituals more and more grounding. I feel less gripped with anxiety — though I feel the profound sadness and grief of missing the proximity and touch of family.
Now I spend my days with our neighbours, the crows next door, their chatter and to-and-froing as busy as a city neighbourhood. There is a society of sparrows and finches, woodpeckers and kites (though the swallows are late arriving from their travels this year); and a university of bees (of many types) and little black spiders that are hustling indoors and out. And the early meadow is greening and the trees slowly budding.
These sights and sounds, and the shape of our home, were always meant to be lived with. Home needs to be learned slowly somehow — embedded within us. The constant leaving and arriving somewhere else interrupts this; and this, in times to come, might be regarded as strange piece of cultural madness.
Travel has often been touted as a channel for learning and expanding the mind — ‘travel is good for the soul’, goes one slogan. Or might this just be a cultural excuse of privilege as, for many, travel is simply a necessity born from social and ecological crisis?
Being present with where we are, right now, might be the key to true belonging — so that when we are invited once again to be in motion, we might ask ourselves, this time, why on Earth we might want to get up and leave…
An odd species
An odd species,
always leaving home,
always in motion;
this compulsion
was never
consequence free.
Expand your mind,
attract invitations,
visit foreign places,
or visit teeming
wonderlands beyond
your back door.
Now I am a
stay-at-home — like
all of us must be –
I wonder why I
have been so stuck
on anticipation,
why the journey
was so much more
than the arrival,
when belonging
was always
satisfaction enough.
