What is the problem with travel and time for those who can’t take either for granted - for those who suddenly feel there’s not that long left, nor that far to go? Children leave our orbits into new ones; partners seem more silent than ever during breakfast. You count regrets in hours rendered lazy by compulsion. Rooms start to shrink several square inches a day. In younger years, as we build homes
, we shun the outside. Indeed, we fear the Orpheus-like call of wanderlust. As nests empty, and the homes we built are now silent caves of survival, the fear remains. Can we strike out? Can we take a cab to the airport through the safety of our monotony, and take a flight to somewhere? Someplace there is a mountain or the sea that we stand in front of for ourselves, not for our progeny or for social theatrics, for renewal and not for vacation? The questions and fears of travel are oddly related to Time. If you can travel, you break the silence of the greying time that remains, you bring words and laughter into that “next phase”. Yet, when you have got to the stage we are talking about in life, you fear travel for two reasons. One, the minutiae. You were so busy building a life till now, you did not notice how the world has changed outside your perimeter. How does one “do” mountains or beaches these days. Can you really trek? What does one have to afford if one wants more comfort than shoestring? Two, what would it feel to be yourselves - you and yourself, and you and those you would take along for company on travel? Would the exhausted silence of the breakfast table travel with you? When you, from a window at a Peling home-stay, chance upon a peak in the distance on a morning, maybe that silence would turn comfortable and blissful. When you begin to convert your silences from exhausted, empty to silken, embroidered with meaning, perhaps you will start to fear the time in your homes less. After batting our half-centuries, a question we can ask ourselves is: all right, we are here now, what thrill of the unknown is allocated to us? One set of thrills are the places we haven’t seen. The other set of thrills could well be the bits of ourselves, and those most important to us, that we haven’t explored before. We can’t explore either in our regular world, immersed in our regular phones. We need to take those flights.