An early return home
A good part of planning this travel had begun with imagination. When I imagined myself traveling for years, something felt very right about it. So I began to come up with plans to make the imagination a reality. Likewise, I have been imagining on the roads what the last moment of this travel will be like, and that imagined feeling of the final moment has been guiding me through the latter part of this journey.
Yet that imagination did not survive until the end when I learned that the country where I was in was going to close its border within a day or two due to the pandemic, and there was still quite an amount of uncertainty around what was really going to happen. So I, quite luckily still, found the next available flights and returned to my family.
It might feel like I had a project which ended prematurely. But when I remember the early days on the roads and also the very first video I shot on Day 1, I concluded that one of the main goals was to have a break from a goal-driven lifestyle at least for a while. The idea was about providing myself a protected safe in which I can practice focusing on ‘being here’ rather than ‘getting there’. And needless to say safety comes first, both for myself and for the people I meet on the road. It is not a great time to travel.
I still do hope that first, the world becomes a safer place soon and second, that I can finish the very last planned itineraries in the near future. I was planning to cover the Central Asian region and the Russian Far East. It might end up being a question of ‘if’, not to mention ‘when’, but I’ll have fingers crossed for the best.
In the meantime, I’ll slowly review my past travels and define what I want to do with all the collection of feelings and recorded materials.
I write mostly for myself, but it has been a pleasure to be able to share some of my feelings with you.
@ Inchon International Airport, South Korea, March 16, 2020
