Travel Is A Paradox

by Michael Lough (New Zealand)

A leap into the unknown New Zealand

Sometimes travel doesn’t hit you until you arrive home. Only once you have returned to routine, do the sprinkles of joy from a foreign land come to you. That everybody did seem to smile in Denmark and how supermarkets have cushy floors in Canada. Arriving home from travel is a bit like death. It's like when someone passes away and all their oddities come back to you, in staggered bittersweet reminders of something you took for granted… Travel is a paradox. Much like life. You travel to come home to yourself. Yet when you return home, you often feel more distant than ever before. What is most interesting is the people. We travel to Berlin and assume we’ll engage ourselves with hipster Germans, complete with alternative fashion and liberal minds. But what you expect never happens in travel. What you expect never happens in life. The hostels spin with the visitors of every nation, except the one you’ve come to visit. Yet what's most interesting is that we find peace in this. It’s not that we seek to be fulfilled by the local people when we visit faraway lands. What we are really seeking perhaps is an acceptance of ourselves in a world that isn’t familiar. Despite being away from the ‘locals’ of Berlin or Mexico City or Darwin Australia, this odd assortment of fellow travellers becomes a new earth. A new society of people to connect to. You realise that the whole world is seeking itself. Seeking to learn from others. Seeking to find a place amongst the unknown. In doing so, we come to figure that ‘locals’, is a state of mind. It’s funny how travellers often seem to visit and know more about the country their visiting then the countrymen themselves… We travel the landscapes of the world, but perhaps we are really just yearning to trek the outline of our souls. To climb the mountains of our spirits, so we can cross the stormy waters of our minds onwards until finally, we are home. Travel is a paradox because travel is home.