Well hello there.
It’s been two months since the last time I sat down to write a newsletter, and three and a half months (and seven countries) since we started this grand experiment of traveling full-time.
I don’t know how to sum it up, other than to say that the time has indeed been full. Full of new places, new experiences, and new memories… and more prosaically, of new flights, new transit systems, new levels of exhaustion to contend with while balancing the new travel spreadsheets and itineraries that now dictate our lives.
Traveling is wondrous, inspiring, a dream.
Traveling is challenging, tiring, frustrating.
All of these things can be true.
To be honest, I’ve been thinking about this newsletter the entire time we’ve been on the road. Two things stood in my way: first, I was often too tired to write. And second, I didn’t know how to fit all the things I was experiencing into a tidy plot that would make any sense.
As for the first problem, we’re at the beginning of a 3-week stint in the Netherlands, which is the longest amount of time we’ve spent anywhere since we set foot in Europe. I’m hoping that by slowing down here, I’ll have more time and energy to write.
And as for the second problem, I’ve simply realized that I was putting too much pressure on myself. You see, my favorite travel writing has a narrative arc of some kind — the traveler finds love, or learns to integrate themselves into a community in a foreign land, or gets to know themselves better, or heck, builds a house. Yet the stories we tell about our lives often only become clear in retrospect, because we don’t know the ends of the various chapters as we’re living them.
But sometimes you can sense the vague edges of the story as it’s happening, and quite honestly, that’s what tripped me up. I had the beginning of a story: a girl gets on a plane to Tokyo, about to travel the world for a year.
The problem is that I don’t know the end of that story, and so I stalled out whenever I went to write. I didn’t know what plot threads to focus on, or how I was supposed to frame the experiences I was having. Quite frankly, I still don’t know.
After months of struggling with the problem, I’m finally ready to admit that the plot has left the building. She may return to us later, but for now, I don’t have the proper perspective with which to tell you The Story of Mari’s Travels. Instead, I will simply tell you what I can, and I’ll think of this travelogue less as a story and more as a notebook in which to record impressions, notes, and memories. They won’t always have a point, or a proper beginning, middle, and end — and that’s ok.
After all, life is messy when we’re in the thick of it.
But something I forgot is that the messiness can be part of the fun. 😉
Talk more soon,
Mara
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