what happens on the bus

I remember when I was younger how much I loved staring out the window during family road trips, watching everything go by, feeling completely carefree and in awe of the world. I was perfectly content with my little headphones on blasting away Amy Grant and Disney tunes as the American landscape wizzed by, cornfields, countryside, ocean views, mountains, highways, and semis igniting my imagination. And while I never left the country (except for Canada) before I was 22 years old, those road trips burrowed deep within me and gave rise to my wanderlust, feeding my inquisitive, explorative, outside-the-box self.

I miss the long bus rides in South America. How else do you get to sit and do absolutely nothing but just be for 10 hours straight while still accomplishing a necessary task? The serenity of being carried from one place to another, going into a slightly meditative state with my favorite music and wide-eyed soaking up the landscape. I think I probably spent over 200 hours (the equivalent of nine consecutive days) on a bus during my ten month journey. Sure, I read some, journaled some, tuned in for some of the B-grade movies they would show, and slept when it was dark, but the rest of the time it was me and my window to the world. 

I’m still figuring out who I became in those long journey hours - in between the flurries of tours, excitement, hostels, clubs, bars, and conversations with hundreds of fellow travelers - in that time where I could let it all settle in, process, and unravel itself to the melodies of my music and the varying countrysides. What has been true about my other homecomings from abroad, and definitely this one, is that it takes coming home to the familiar to see how much I have changed. And maybe with each of these journeys I can pinpoint my core truths, the ones that remain or have grown after everything I have experienced.

Grocery stores and shopping malls are probably the most difficult places to go to right after coming home. The absurdity of choice for the most basic of needs in contrast to the small family-owned shops and markets. And you develop a simultaneous distaste and appreciation for how many varieties of chips and cereal you can choose from, delighted with fresh fruit and vegetables of all kinds being at your fingertips at any time of the year while also longing for a small street corner store where what you have for dinner is dictated by what they have, not what you want.

And it goes deeper than that. While traveling, you don’t have to commit to an occupation, you’re a traveler. You don’t have to answer to responsibility or status.  You don’t have to comply with the rules that you’re used to that define and place you in the society you grew up in. But after traveling for an extended period of time, you find yourself starting to look for those rules to know where you are, to find your position in the world. You don’t have to stand staring at the multitude of pasta sauces bordering on panic from choice overload, but you lack the overarching ties of long-term friendship and a place to call home to create a stable context for your identity.

So you go home to find that context. And find yourself a welcomed stranger to the bustle of life that appears to have not changed in the least since you left. Soon your celebrity status of ‘just having returned from traveling for a long time’ wears off, something you mistook as friends wanting to hear about where you’ve been, what you’ve been through, and even when they do ask, the attention span is inversely proportionate to the size of the question. ‘What’s it like to come home after so much time?’ ‘What was your favorite part?’ ‘Where all did you go, what all did you do?’ Your answers become short and canned, and you find yourself getting swept away in your old routines, your journey recessing to the part of the brain that stores figments and patches of your dreams and nightmares.

A good friend of mine recently told me: ‘Those experiences were for no one else but you.’ And it’s true; I didn’t go travel for anyone else but me. Hell, I gave up on my ambitious plan to volunteer in every country I went to so I could just be in the world and try to figure out who I was without always having some bigger cause to assign myself to. Everyone’s experiences are their own, but isn’t it how we survive in this world, by relating to one another? By sharing? What do you do with a series of intense, amazing experiences in the midst of the daily routines of your life, of your friends’ lives? 

Now before I start to sound like so many other bloggers out there throwing their emotional pontifications online with underlying tones of loneliness and a strange propensity for feeling like they’re alone in their woes despite all the other blogs as contrary evidence, let me make it clear that I am writing for writing’s sake, so that I may pull my experiences from the recesses of my mind, bring them to light, and grapple with them accordingly. And I decided to make it public to join the cyber community of meta-progress of collective humanity. And I’m egotistic enough to think that others might gain something or wish to engage in dialogue with me in this substitute for bus/car window musings. That I may capture my thoughts instead of losing them in that moment when the sun set over the Caribbean ocean. To give a spoken truth to who I was, who I am, and who I’m becoming. My journey did not end in South America, and I still have a lot to say.

For those of you looking for more of a basic update of where I’m at after being home for six weeks: I recently moved into a room in an old Victorian house in the Capitol Hill area of Denver with two other roommates. I am in progress to getting a job; I’ve had three interviews, and have four more next week, all positions either in administration or development in the nonprofit sector; a nice problem to have, but still a bit daunting. The next week or so should be fairly defining in the shape life takes for me as far as what job offers I get and what I decide to do. I am battling between what I really want to do (find work in the international sector, pursue a six-month fellowship in another country that starts in the fall) and settling for a ‘solid’ position with good pay and benefits. 

The transitory life or the stable one? How do you develop meaningful relationships with people when you know goodbye is just around the corner? But how long do you wait around for meaningful relationships to develop in a society plagued by mistrust, lack of self-confidence, and obsession with all other media but your own thoughts and emotions?

february 2010