This memoir about travel made me super emotional and want to get on a plane and go. It's so crazy how when I read something my life becomes consumed by the topic of the book. For the past 5 days, I've just been thinking of where to go next and how to budget so I can do so. Wanderlust, man.
Read it so that you can along on this journey with Elisabeth and begin to plan adventures of your own as well.
Below are my favorite quotes from this lovely story because yes:
"I couldn't live with my head somewhere else. I had to embrace my surrounding, because this time was only to go by once, and I didn't want to spend it wishing for things to be different." PREACH.
"A voyage has to have a destination to give it shape and flavor. We quest for something desirable, but we also desire quests."
"What do you want?" I asked.
"What do you mean?"
"What do you want? In your life."
"I want to be wild; I want to be free."
"Even if I could have stopped time, I knew it wouldn't have the desired effect, because something essential would be missing, some sharpness of focus made possible by the fact that life was fleeting."
"I now say that this was a hazard of being away all the time, this failure to entwine myself with people in one place."
"What I most wanted to do was travel more, without an end date or obligation in sight. I wanted to wander and feel free."
"The idea of roaming intoxicated me to the extent that I couldn't look at the glossy cover of a travel magazine, or browse the travel section of a bookstore, without getting a lump in my throat."
But I couldn't muster the feeling that anything mattered, I was carrying around my bruised copy of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "...the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant." I thought I'd detached from the earth and was floating through the air.
"The best kind of travel-the kind I wanted to experience-involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to the deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one's life changed forever by a chance encounter."
"Most good travel stories are about discovering the unexpected. The travel goes abroad with an illusion, the illusion is shattered, but then she learns something new, and after assorted challenges and humiliations, she achieves a satisfying epiphany."
"I'd be there one moment, and then, poof, I'd be gone. I romanticized the quick disappearance, but really I just I hated the awkwardness of leaving. I hated the heartfelt statements that were required, and the declarations of intent that I already knew wouldn't come to fruition."
"The business of creating an adult life was difficult to think about, so I preferred things that distracted me or, ideally, overwhelmed me. Anything to push thought aside."
"I was trying to prove something, but I wasn't sure what it was, or whom it was for."
"I'd wanted to let my life be changed, but suddenly I was on the precipice of letting all go too far. I saw various lives unspooling before me. In one I was free to build a career, move to a big city, be young and aspiring at the center of the world. In another I never left the southern hemisphere."
"Travel is life changing."
