Last Friday I went to see Eat.Pray.Love with my besties and fiance. { I am not a fan of romcoms, they stopped appealing to me in my adult life. But this one had Julia Roberts in the lead role and she will never stop appealing to me}.
The movie failed to come together well (for me). But the one thing I could relate to is the main character's feeling of being stifled and then regarding travel as the answer to all life's questions.The most poignant line in the movie is when she says "I need to marvel at something". That's really how I feel. I'm not being ungrateful about the wonderful and MARVELous life I have here. I just acknowledge that to understand myself in relation to creation and to all living things, I need to have my horizons widened. I need material that will abate my writer's block, give me a new appreciation for the things I have and inspire a rebirth of my spirituality.
I see travel as the route to closeness to God. I want to push my toes in the sand of a foreign shore and contemplate the levels of His greatness. How He created this beach and all beaches, this person and all people. My mind has not been able to properly comprehend existence. All I know is here, Cape Town. I want to offer my experiences to the rest of the world and receive the same gift in return. There are nooks of the earth that are calling for me by name.
I don't need to run away from anything (anymore). My need to travel has been modified over time. It may have started in adolescence when nothing I said made sense- but I've brought it with me into my late (yuck) twenties where its form has more maturity and clarity every day.
I want to travel in the name of adventure. In Cape Town, in my culture, people tend to get married, struggle in a job that pays too little then panic as soon as they have children.
Am I wrong to want more?
Why should I ignore the voice that says 'travel' when most people don't even have these all-important soliloquies (#happytobecrazy) . People look at the idea of temporary immigration as something that is so impossible to do.But I need to go, even if it means failing and missing home too much and going around in a circle just to prove that temporary immigration is impossible.
When you know where your home is you should be able to move away from it freely.
People who haven't experienced other cultures or countries are different to those who have. I don't want to be a visitor to a country, I want to be a citizen for as long as I'm there. I want to learn a new language, cook with their foods, live by their traditions and their rules. I want to know the country's favourite landmarks (not the ones in books or on the Travel channel- but the ones the locals pick). I want to eat at the best indigenous restaurants and be in awe of the things that are so different to what I know. I want to stay long enough to tap into a culture's secrets and be a part of the way they do things in their part of the world.
however....
My need to travel comes second to my need to be a wife. In 4 months time I will take on a responsibility that will hopefully change me for the better.
I have been told I will need to make compromise the mantra for that chapter of my life.
On Friday my fiance was interviewed for a Cape Town-based job that he feels could be the answer to all his life's questions. Heavy. We got into a heated debate about these two conflicting life paths. Adventure vs. Security; Not knowing vs. Knowing; Possibility of no money for a while vs. Money; Change of scenery vs. Cape Town. At the height of the debate I fell quiet. He carried on speaking about all things logical, sensible, correct and safe but I began to exit the moment...
It became apparent to me that a big test would be on our hands were he to get this job. And before he even had to ask me to stay in Cape Town, I was trying to make myself okay with it. Soon it would be my duty to support him, soon I would have to start behaving like a woman who was answerable to someone else.
It hurt very much the same way that a broken heart does. Because it has the same ingredient.
The conspicuous truth that kills a concept you once believed in.
Traveling in the way that I would like to do it would have to be put up on the shelf next to skydiving, shaving my head and having coffee with John Mayer. I'm not resigning from my dreams. I'm accepting that my fiance makes more sense and I'm prematurely accepting the role of the trophy wife over the role of the jet-setting ethnographer.
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