Inspiration to travel usually begins with a deep longing for a particular feeling.
PHOTO LENA KAZERFinding what your looking for when traveling is far more complicated than it seems. Inspiration to travel usually begins with a deep longing for a particular feeling, though it often disguises itself in the desperate need to reach a certain physical destination. For the lucky traveler, the two go hand in hand. But for everyone else, some work has to be done to discover this discrepancy, and essentially, discover what it is you are looking for before you endeavor to find it. My romantic vision of strolling the streets of Europe with a wine bottle in one hand and set of paints in the other slipped away as I struggled with little money and sometimes a lack of inspiration. The autumn skies were grey, the air was cold, and my leather jacket was back in Chicago. No amount of beer could chase away my concern that something was missing.
I think that missing feeling is the Hollywood perfected lighting that enshrouds a city in the movies, making everyone look classic and timeless. It’s the pink-gold gel-filter, that when combined with the right music makes anything seem possible: love, miracles, chance encounters, you name it. The movies touch something inside us that wills us to go, throw our fears to the wind, sell the house, tell the boss to shove it, and travel. Three movies that get me every time (don’t judge me) are Before Sunrise, Midnight in Paris, and Vicky Christina Barcelona. I watched them this summer and fell instantly in love with the idea of travelling in Europe.
PHOTO LENA KAZERBut as I travelled by myself, tentatively placing one combat boot in front of the other, my crisp white button down didn’t billow in the wind like Scarlett Johansson’s, instead my oversized sweater shed green lint all over my leggings. I didn’t sip wine and stretch out on an international train to France with Ethan Hawke, but instead slept alone with my head between my knees on a twenty-two hour bus ride. My life abroad was not like the movies. It was life.
Identifying the origin of this feeling of disappointment took me an extremely long time. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t blissfully happy wandering the streets of each new city, meeting Owen Wilson on the street corner to talk Hemingway. Of course there were some moments of clarity and contentment, but a lot of the time I felt hollow. I was searching for that warm content feeling you get when you know you are in the right place at the right time, but I couldn’t find it. There was no cameraman to cast me in gold light and make me feel like I belonged. My inability to find the feeling I flew across the world for left me slightly depressed and anxious.
PHOTO LENA KAZERAfter a few weeks I accepted that life in Europe was…life in Europe. Each day I took a walk, searched for something, and met someone. I stopped missing the phantom gold light and incidentally found the real thing. When I left for Prague, I wrote that I wanted something inside me to change. I wanted to feel more whole somehow, more open to the world, “excited again” about life in general. I found it. I felt it first when I met two amazing homeless men by Victoria Station in London. I felt a similar feeling growing each night when I logged on Skype to see my boyfriend or my Mom waking up as I went to bed. One night I received a simple text from my older sister, “I miss you,” and the epiphany clicked. It didn’t fall on my head like a giant bag of water balloons…it just made sense all of a sudden, like when you finally remember someone’s name. She meant it when she said, “I miss you.”
This sounds anticlimactic, I know. But people these days (myself included) send one another redundant and absent-minded messages every day, texts that require a reply that is practically rhetorical. But being in another country, usually cold, and often lonely, I read that message and knew that my sister missed me and wanted me to know that she was thinking of me. With that recognition, I felt the warm golden feeling I had been searching for on the streets of Prague, along the canals in Amsterdam, and in the record stores of Berlin. I found it in a Whatsapp instant message from my big sister.
So what I learned in 2012 is this: if you’re chasing that warm golden light and the feeling that you’re in the right place at the right time, you don’t need to get on an airplane to find it. It’s buried in your interactions with people. It emerges in your acceptance of whatever hardship you come to face, and in the strength you find in yourself to conquer it. If you ever feel something is missing as you travel, or that what you are searching for you haven’t found, I ask you this: re-think what it is that you left looking for. You may realize that you’re chasing a feeling, not an experience. Once you realize that, finding the golden light that inspired you to go in the first place will seem less like an impossibility, and more like the light reflecting off of your beer. Cheers to a safe, gratifying, and travel-filled 2013. I hope you find what you’re looking for.
