Thinking about Leaving

On the Road Home: I took this in high school in my hometown

I think that the final chapter in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel is wonderfully poignant, especially as I read it in the final weeks of my stay in Prague. Last weekend I had taken my final trip, to Sweden, and throughout the entire journey home I kept thinking about the sense of leaving, and of longing to stay. Since January 16, I have been in a new environment almost constantly. Not only have I been a stranger in Prague, but I have traveled to so, so many different countries and places. I feel that I have been looking around me with fresh eyes so constantly that the habit of journeying is now engrained in my vision.
Coming home from Sweden I thought a lot about what it would be like to go home. I felt that the words in de Botton’s final chapter were ones I could have written myself, concerning thinking that we’ve discovered everything interesting about our homes: “It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place where we have been living for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind to it” (234). For a while I truly dreaded returning to my home in the suburbs of Boston for an entire three months for the summer. My friends from high school and I often complain about feelings of boredom or disinterest in that around us.
But the reason why I am not full of dread now, is because I really do believe that these past few months have had an intense effect on the way I conduct my daily life. This may sound dramatic, but it is very, very true. I have traveled mostly alone with a eurail pass that gives me an inordinate amount of time to reflect on my behavior and life and surroundings. Like de Botton said: “It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our
responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others” (248). The company I kept was the world around me, and the strangers I encountered. Occasionally I found myself traveling with one of my best friends, who is also my roommate here in Prague, or meeting up with my boyfriend. But for the most part, and those experiences where I felt I learned most, I was alone.
I will return home and I will try to keep this sense of self that I have felt growing within me over the past few months. I know that it will be hard at first, and I will probably feel similar to the opening lines of “On Habit”, thinking that everyone and everything around me is stubbornly the same. But I will try to explore every day, not only around my bedroom, but through the backyards and small parks that are on a map in my memory. I know that they have changed, just as I have, as time has gone on. I only need to look in a different way, or among different people. Inspiration is infinite.