Essential Only? Travel
I may get in trouble for writing this one, but oh well. I missed my girlfriends.
I crossed the Canada/US border. I got on a plane. To meet up with my friends.
Who would have thought that THAT would have been risky behaviour two years ago? Nobody. Now it is not only risky, even frowned upon, but so so necessary.
I think that when covid started and we were informed “essential only travel” we all knew what that meant. Stay home unless you had important business/work to do, someone was dying, no groceries left in the house…that kind of thing.
More than two years later, I think we are sick of being told by someone else what is essential. Whose standards are they anyway? Who gets to decide what is essential and important? For example, what about our mental health?
I believe that the new research coming out is changing the pecking order of what is important. Originally it was to protect lives, period. I think now we need to look deeper.
For example, where does socialization rank on the importance scale? Or girlfriends? That may sound trivial when we are talking about life and death, but maybe there are much deeper implications to the lack of human contact that we really need to be looking at now.
I read an article recently about senior care homes and how the lack of social contact may be shortening lives, increasing the progression of dementia, and causing depression and anxiety. Do these things not matter as well?
A friend recently sent me a cool article about the link between stress and disease. It came from Facebook, which I do not have, so I will have to paraphrase.
Apparently, the head of Psychiatry at Stanford said that one of the best things a woman could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends. Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences. Physically this quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create serotonin — a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being. He said that spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.
There is a tendency to think that when we are “exercising” we are doing something good for our bodies; but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged. Not true. In fact, he said that failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking!
So, I went to Palm Springs.
I have had an amazing group of girlfriends in a ladies bible study for about twenty plus years that have met regularly. Typically every other Tuesday night, for a very long time. Then covid happened and we didn’t. For a very long time.
A couple of the gals have second homes in Palm Springs and the discussion started. Could we go? Could we meet there? Could we?!
Yes, we did.
Firstly, I would like to say that crossing the U.S. border previously was like having toast. I did it regularly, probably weekly “back in the day”. Living in a border town in Canada and going to the U.S. for gas, cheese and beer was a normal thing. That seems like a long time ago.
We were overdue.
So I white knuckled it and went. It was scary. Would the U.S. accept me? Did I have the right paperwork? Would I catch covid while travelling?? So many things to consider.
I did it. And it was worth it.
My soul has been fed. I got to hug my girlfriends again and again and again. Love hugging. Miss hugging.
It should be noted that the value of friendship is not just a notion or theory, as is so well represented by Lydia Denworth:
“It’s time to bring friendship to the foreground. To see it for what it is. It actually is a matter of life and death. It is carried in our DNA, in how we’re wired. Social bonds have the power to shape the trajectories of our lives. And that means friendship is not a choice or a luxury; it’s a necessity that is critical to our ability to succeed and thrive.”
— taken from the book: Friendship. The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond — by Lydia Denworth.
As I travel on the plane home and watching the sunset, my heart is full. This was the best risk I have taken in a long time. I hope there are more to come with a payoff as rich as this has been.
