It has been a long time since I have been on a real international adventure, and I had forgotten that almost every meaningful trip eventually reduces me to tears.
It usually happens on the flight home, once the navigation, decision-making and daily momentum of being somewhere unfamiliar are over. I sit there looking out the window while some part of the experience I could not understand in real time finally catches up with me. This has happened often enough that I expected it somewhere over the Atlantic on the way home from Barcelona.
It did not happen.
I kept waiting, but mostly I was tired, managing the children and thinking about the ordinary life waiting for us when we landed. The emotion came a few nights later, after the suitcases had been unpacked, the kids were asleep and Matt and I had found our way back to each other in the particular way two people sometimes do after being absorbed for weeks by travel, parenting and everything else.
Lying awake that night, I suddenly felt overwhelmed, although it took me a while to understand what had happened. I felt intensely present and strangely returned to myself, as though Barcelona had quietly loosened something I had not known had become so tight. I remembered what it felt like to be turned on by my own life.
That phrase sounds more provocative than I mean it to, although perhaps the charge in it is part of the point. I mean feeling alert to possibility again, interested in what might happen next and curious enough to be pulled beyond the familiar boundaries of my life rather than merely becoming better at managing everything already inside them.
The feeling immediately took me back to being twenty-three, nearly five months into teaching English in Japan in what I now describe as my post-college professional procrastination job. I was terribly homesick and, perhaps because I did not know what else to do with myself, hopped on a plane and spent two weeks traveling alone through Thailand. I met people whose lives looked nothing like mine and became intoxicated by the way they moved through the world—not waiting for more certainty, but collecting stories, taking chances and allowing experience to change them. I remember sobbing with joy on the flight back to Japan because I was returning to the same apartment, the same job and the same unresolved questions, yet none of it felt quite as confining. Somewhere in Thailand, I had discovered that happiness had less to do with my circumstances than with how willing I was to participate in my own life.
I had not thought about that flight in years, but I recognized the feeling immediately after Barcelona. The trip itself had been extraordinary, although not remotely restful. We walked five or six miles most days through a city I had never seen before, surrounded by architecture that made me want to stop constantly and look up. There were beautiful people, different fashion, warmer weather, incredible food and ice cream every day, which is the kind of family tradition that requires no discussion or justification while traveling.
The greatest pleasure was watching Indy and Eden encounter Spain and realize that the Spanish they speak so fluently does not belong only to school. It was how people ordered food, made friends, argued, laughed and moved through daily life. At the same time, they are independent city kids growing more confident by the day, while Matt and I remained responsible for keeping track of them through crowded metro stations, busy streets and unfamiliar neighborhoods. I could be absorbed by a building or listening to them speak Spanish with someone new while still calculating exactly where everyone was and how quickly one of them could disappear from sight. It was joyful, beautiful and just stressful enough that I deserved a daily afternoon Vermut.
Somewhere inside that mix, I stopped thinking about myself in the way I had been thinking about myself at home. I have not especially enjoyed watching my body change with age. It had become an ongoing low-level conversation in the background of my life, never dramatic enough to dominate it, but persistent enough that I had begun to experience myself partly from the outside. Barcelona made that conversation irrelevant for a while. I was walking all day, keeping up with my family, looking at buildings, noticing how people dressed, tasting things, getting lost and figuring out where we were going next. My body was not an object I was assessing. It was how I was moving through the experience.
I did not come home looking different. I came home feeling different, although I did not recognize it until that quiet night with Matt, when something about closeness, familiarity and being fully present brought the realization to the surface.
For months, I had been trying to articulate a larger reason behind all the effort I put into my work and the life we are building. I kept arriving at some variation of wanting our family to have adventures together that help us grow. It was a perfectly good answer, but it did not really mean anything to me until we went somewhere unfamiliar together and I felt what it was describing.
Maybe I never needed a better answer. Maybe I simply needed to remember the feeling beneath it: the world becoming larger again, my children discovering that what they know can carry them farther than they imagined, and me returning home more interested in my own life than I had been when I left.
And now, inconveniently, I want to go everywhere.
