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Traveler's Limbo

Traveling can put you in limbo. It’s in between places, destinations, cities, country sides. It’s blurred pictures, scenary, suns, moon, clouds. It’s changing time zones, ecology, climates, and soils. It’s full of anticipation of the next destination, the next adventures, and the strangers who will intrigue you with new conversations and points of view. It’s also feeling sadness of leaving the last place, the understanding of that place that you worked to build, and the companions that you made.

Traveling from one place to another can feel like floating in thin air or on open water—completely free—or it can feel suffocating tight with anxiety of just wanting to be there.

These emotions can easily pull you from the present. They can mute your senses of what’s around you at that moment, at that space in time, at that second of your life that you’ll never get back.

I know lots of people (me included sometimes) who take sleeping pills or other drugs/alcohol to numb these feelings. This isn’t bad by any means because sometimes it is necessary to maintain sanity. But there’s also something beautiful about allowing those raw emotions that traveling brings about to circulate through you. They can take you on a journey through yourself and how you view the world around you.

On this impromptu trip home where everything came together in one hour—from me thinking I wouldn’t be home until August to me calling my family and saying I’d be home in FOUR DAYS—my excitement level is 460% over the top. No waiting or countdown necessary; my 4 day journey began 12 hours after purchasing the flight. It would be an understatement to say that after 2.25 years of imagining this moment, I’m in shock.

Let me backtrack a second though- an easy coping mechanism for whenever I felt homesick during my time on the African continent was to tuck away those places, people, happy memories, and comforts of home in a little protected place inside me. I always have them with me, but I don’t let them come out to play with my imagination. But now that the plane ticket is in my inbox, I’ve unlocked that overflowing file labeled as “My Life in America.” My heart and mind are flooded with emotions that keep flowing out of me—keeping my mind and heart racing to try to keep up with this great onset of everything. My whole body and spirit is consumed with trying to process and control, or at least organize, these emotions.


At this moment though, as I watch the crescent shaped, rippling sand dunes fly past me outside the window, I don’t want to think or process it all. I’m challenging myself to return to the present. I’m in flux, moving, traveling, seeing, and experiencing, right now. I can be excited to return home, but still allow myself  This is life; life does not start when that plane touches the runway in America or I run into the arms of my awaiting loved ones. It’s here now and everywhere.

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