Embracing Our Current Emptiness

Do you ever feel a bit empty and not fully understand why? I think that’s been us this week. The thing with travelling is it leaves you a lot of time with your own thoughts. The long buses, or the time swinging in a hammock or lying on a beach. Maybe those last two seem super relaxing, they probably are when you are on holiday, but for me it’s changed this week. It’s officially moved from Summer holiday territory, to long term travel. All my colleagues at home are back to work, all Philly’s Uni friends have moved onto their next thing, and we are here, swinging on hammocks and drinking beer on the beach. Excuse me while I verbal diarrhoea my live thoughts here as I’m sure things will change as the weeks and months go by. However, right now we are having a lot of long talks and a lot of reflecting. I presume a lot of people who enter into long term travel experience similar things. I mean I could probably wait till we come out on the other side and have lovely dialogue about finding ourselves or some crap, but maybe people need to hear about people losing themselves as well.

I think for me the struggle is losing a sense of purpose, I feel a little aimless at the moment, and I am the type of person that needs a purpose, to be working towards something. I remember after Uni I missed that feeling of constantly having something on my mind, ya know, even when you were binge watching Scrubs, at the back of your mind you knew there was some work or assignment or revision you had to do. I remember telling my brother in law I thought I wanted to do teaching, and he said I would always be bringing work home, i would always have marking to do and planning, and I would never have a free evening or weekend again. He said teaching would consume my entire life, and for some reason that made me want to do it even more lol. I can’t switch off, I need to have something to do. Philly jokes even teaching wasn’t enough for me, I had to become a youth leader and have youth to worry about on the weekends and call throughout the week, and join the tennis committee so I had those emails and meetings to worry about. I personally need to be involved, I need a purpose, I need to be useful and here I have none of that.

It should be freeing, but it’s less peaceful freeing and more like wtf am I doing freeing. Perhaps this is the beginning of the “finding yourself” people talk about when you long term travel. When you don’t have the busyness of every day to distract you, where you are just confronted with the constant dialogue of your own mind. Don’t get me wrong, we are having lots of fun, but there is a lot of time between the fun where we are both questioning everything in our lives lol. What am I doing? What is important to me? Why are we here? What makes us happy? We appreciate now some of the things that made us happy back in London. Number one: Vegan food options – everywhere! London is so easy for us to eat out, any type of cuisine we want at any time is only a tube ride away. We miss that A LOT. We miss our local climbing centre @Stronghold we love you. We were climbing almost 4 times a week, now we’ve climbed 4 times in a month. I miss tennis, he misses playing music & drums, I miss Church, he misses time alone and we both miss seeing my awesome nieces all the time and our idiot cat.

Being away definitely makes you think about the things you value in life, the things that matter. Turns out food matters to us more than we both realised lol, the days we’ve had a kitchen and a veggie market have been amazing, I’ve really loved experimenting making some yum vegan food. I’ve also realised that plastic waste bothers me a lot more than I thought it did, as well as waste in general and the affect us humans and our consumerist ways are having on the Earth. Philly is realising how much he truly loves bouldering and that it brings him real peace, it’s something he wants to focus on more when we get back. More than ever, we are both realising that things brings us no real joy at all. We don’t miss our clothes, our stuff, our apartment or even our comfort, we miss a purpose.

I would encourage everyone to take time out from the busyness of their life to try and reflect a bit more. Even though it’s difficult here constantly doing it, I reckon trying to do it a bit in everyday life is probably really good for mental health. Also, if anyone else out there is trying something new and like us are wondering what the frig you are doing, I would say persevere! Embrace feeling lost, because only when you are lost can you be truly found (or some similar cliche). Well, we hope so anyway!

Philly & Keely