Small things

I’ve been thinking about small things lately: the spill of yellow leaves under our wheels as we pedalled lake-side this morning; the singing of my muscles after a bike ride (sleepy, restored); hearing a friend say “it’s so good to hear your voice” through crackled phones half a world apart; warm coffee and ‘Dreams’ by Gabrielle.

I’ve been thinking about big things, too: Amanda saying she saw a cloud pass over me when I saw something that made me feel sad at work and talking to me amidst the fog; chatting to Sarah about life and travel, about feeling untethered and grounding across the world (our serendipitous meeting leading to her becoming my cabin-neighbour for a little while); Carli lending me her well-loved edition of ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ and feeling the joy of free-falling into a book again.

These last few weeks have felt heavy, but slowly I have been unravelling the threads of the weight. “Travelling”, Sarah has reminded me, is saddled with the expectation of its life-changing moments. But for something to be “life-changing”, the implication is that there should be upheaval. For the muscle to grow, it must be torn and re-sewn.

So often moments of sadness magnify the beauty of tender moments, our senses alert to the frequencies of others more acutely than normal. An elderly couple concentrating on the crossword in one another’s arms during my café shift made me love our species’ tendency for tenderness. The way my arms hugged around my friend’s belly reminded me of the softness of my Grandad’s chest and the comfort I feel whenever he is close. Hugging my friend made me miss him, a bodily reminder of our distance combined with the privilege of feeling closeness with a new friend.

Phillipa Perry terms this form of bodily memory ‘mutual transference’ in ‘Conversations on Love’. “Our body has a memory that isn’t conscious” she says, “maybe the way Nanny’s hair fell across her forehead, or what it felt like to be given a piggyback on Dad’s back.” These pre-verbal memories act on us in profound ways, guiding us to certain people or places that feel familiar in ways that are sometimes inarticulable.

New Zealand has felt hard in a lot of ways recently and the coming of winter has felt abrupt and unexpected. The pressure to see as much as possible, to ride as many bike parks as I can before the snow comes feels a privilege impossible to achieve. It’s harder to bounce back when your ground is unsettled.  “Home” in this context is once again redefined. Less a place, and more a collection of feelings invested in people who are themselves invested in places, their physical grounding and constant support a “home” that is both accessible through the phone in hours that footnote the daylight, and at an unreachable distance to me.

The nature of travelling is in its comings and goings – it is unsettling, I am finding, as much as it is joyful. But isn’t this why we feel the itch to see more places, meet more people, to experience the multitudes life has to offer? Perhaps it is in experiencing the discomfort that imbues the other parts of life with such intoxicating richness. Maybe home is in the patterns of life we see repeated wherever we are, in the home we carry with us. I’m noticing the certainties I have lived my life alongside shift during my self-inflicted displacement, its legacy manipulating this “travel blog” into a meandering mess of confused thoughts.

If you are still here and reading, thank you - maybe soon I’ll be chatting about New Zealand again!