All-in-1 Flight

“All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” –Robert Louis Stevenson

It is with great disdain that I realize why I have traveled so much in the past 3 years. Aside from more affordable fares to neighboring Asian countries that do not require a tourist visa, it is my means of satisfying my soul that yearns to live in foreign lands. For so long I have always wanted to explore history, to explore human behavior, in the different places that I have visited. And as each travel comes to a close, I feel more and more that there is not enough time for me to connect with that country or to find my closure. It used to be that a 3-day weekend was enough an escape; now it seems not even 5 can suffice. Cheap travel has become a torrid affair, a means for me to cheat my rut, the resignation to my deplorable fate. I have become a philanderer to my own country because I am dissatisfied with the way it is managed. I am my Motherland's black sheep, tired of believing things would improve. Not that other countries I've visited are better off (perhaps a couple or so) to put contrast into perspective, but rather my own exercise of caution and restraint to moving itself, to getting out of my comfort zone in a place that surrounds me by family and familiarity. The restraint that pressures me to kill my creative ideas and leave but one -- the idea of making money. As my sense would put it, if I make money, I would be able to travel more and I would be excused from feeling sorry for myself (and for fooling myself that the end of the world is near).

So perhaps I've run out of countries to explore. Perhaps I have run out of money for my flights of fancy. Nay, I have run out of excuses to deal with the real issue -- the discontentment I feel about myself and my current state of affairs.

Until such time that things are better off for me, I fear I will continue to soar the skies and imagine the clouds lifting my worries to other places, for the sun to burn my guilt, for the flight attendant to usher me out into the new world. I will continue til I have but coins left in my pocket, I will reach for them with rabid enthusiasm for one last joyride ...

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton