#184: Coming home
One of the data points in a constellation of others that helped me feel ready for a baby was that, in the summer of 2022, Avi and I went on a trip to Sicily that made me fall more in love with my life back home. This was not the trip’s intended effect, which was, generally speaking, the permanent alteration of my soul. When we planned it, I’d never been on a big adult vacation before—the kind that involved a long plane ride, a charming hotel, and a carefully curated itinerary. I figured it was time. I’d lived in New York long enough to observe that certain types of people traveled every summer by default. I liked staying back in the city to rot, but I wondered if I could be one of them, too: worldly, untethered, perennially ready with recommendations for that little town in the south of France. Maybe international travel was what I needed to become my most actualized self.
I loved Sicily. Dunking my body in the Mediterranean every afternoon, reading my book as the sun baked salt into my skin. I felt lucky getting lost with Avi in those unmarked cobblestone streets. So lucky that I panicked the whole time that I was going to forget it. Which is why I was surprised to find, a week after I got home, that I felt almost as if I’d never taken the trip at all. I felt no more worldly or seasoned; I wasn’t itching to travel further and further, ignited by a late-onset wanderlust. I’d cherished the trip, I hoped to go on more, but I was the same sort of person I’d always been. This was a relief. I’d thought I should travel more to fulfill the role of the cultured and childless 30-something—to discover, perhaps, what life was all about. The reality was less grandiose: I’d taken a lovely and expensive trip, and now I was home, the same old me.
The time away afforded me something else though. After returning to New York, my ordinary days had a new shine to them: Waking every morning and searching the apartment for my fluffy cat, taking a Saturday train into Manhattan with Avi and no plans, meeting friends for a picnic by the East River, looping the sizzling blocks around my apartment as I thought about what to write. I’d built up travel as this transcendent plane of existence, but the highs of my daily life weren’t so different from the highs of Sicily, if a little less densely packed and picturesque in a postcard kind of way. This was a useful observation at the time, given I was in the midst of deciding whether I could root myself deeper. I had needed to go away, if only so I could come home.
I don’t want to make a case for or against travel. I just want to talk about what happens when it’s over, when wherever we went or whatever we did delivers us back where we started, and forces us to reacquaint ourselves with what we’ve left behind. In Journal of a Solitude, the poet May Sarton documents this loop, starting with her distaste for work travel: “Before a lecture trip [my mood] always [goes] way down. When the time comes, I don’t want to uproot, however much I may complain about the loneliness here.” Despite her dread, the trip is fun and thought-provoking. She’s glad she went. But the return offers her even more: “Oh, how marvelous it was to come home to dear shabby Cambridge, to uneven brick sidewalks, to untrimmed gardens, to lawns covered with leaves, to young people walking hand in hand in absurd clothing,” she writes. “I saw it freshly, saw the beauty of wooden clapboard painted white, of old brick, of my own battered and dying maples, as a shining marvel, a treasure that lifts the mind and the heart and brings everyone who sees it back to what quality is.”
Avi and I were reminded of this cycle while we were in Denver and Detroit last week. This trip was nothing like Sicily (we were visiting family and in and out of hospitals), but in the months leading up to it, we’d grown restless in Brooklyn, cranky in that unclockable way, so used to the temperature of the water we couldn’t feel it anymore. But while we were away, we miss our apartment, our things, our routines. Going away gifted us some much-needed homesickness. Walking back in from our flight, our living room practically glowed. Often we characterize wanderlust or ennui in terms of wanting more: more novelty, more experiences. I wonder how often those longings are borne less of true lack than of a dulled perspective—an inability to see the beauty in one’s immediate surroundings because they’re covered in what Vita Sackville-West called “the little strings and cobwebs of habit” (in a love letter to Virgina Woolf). Sometimes, rather than something new, we need to locate a way of seeing the same old stuff anew.
In “The Case Against Travel,” by Agnes Callard for The New Yorker, which went viral in a bad way last summer, Collard argues that travel doesn’t deserve its reputation for enlightening and connecting us. The bulk of her argument rests on the idea that nobody appears changed after travel, which is impossible to measure. Callard employs the words of fellow travel “skeptics,” missing the possibility in their words: “Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel,” writes Fernando Pessoa. Or: “What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” writes Samual Johnson. Traveling to feel, to jolt your imagination, to learn to see your own home in a new light—these sound like decent reasons to do anything. Callard sums up her point: “The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return.” Do we?
I’ve been thinking about the work vacation in broader terms. Temporarily vacating your career, hobby, mindset, lifestyle, project. Doing things differently for a while for the simple sake of eventually returning to form, and seeing that form anew. It’s refreshing to unburden experimentation like that—to imagine it doesn’t have to be about changing you fundamentally, or testing out new paths to find the right one. It can be about vacating your normal for the express purpose of being placed gently back down where you started, recontextualizing who you’ve always been, or what you’ve always done. Sometimes we don’t need change, we need to shift or act. They’re not the same.
I try to shake myself awake this way all the time. Just this morning I got sidetracked watching old video diaries I’d recorded while pregnant, because I knew that when I closed my phone and returned to my present, I’d feel refreshed about my current state. No longer pregnant, no longer afraid, wiser than the girl crying into the camera about feeling nauseous and bored. I haven’t felt either of those things in a while; it’s nice to be reminded of that. Even if things are okay, even if our lives don’t require radical upheaval, we still need regular and repeated distance from our status quo, physically or figuratively. Going away is the only way to come home.
On the very first page of Journal of a Solitude, Sarton writes that the cycle of deviating from her quiet comforts and then returning to them is what makes her life feel real: “Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.”
My favorite article I read last week was “Everything Is Bravo,” an essay by Emily Kirkpatrick for Ssense. Last Friday’s 15 things also included my current dessert fixations, my POV on the new Couples Therapy villain, a beautiful cookbook and more. The rec of the week was smalltime contemporary painters. So many amazing recs!
On the podcast this past week, I detailed the dramatic last eight days of my life.
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley
P.s. When I told Avi what I was writing about this week, he suggested I include the Pina Colada song due to its relevant themes, and honestly he wasn’t wrong…