To travel mindfully as well as hopefully

When people ask me what I’m doing these days, my first reaction is to say “Well, what is anyone doing?” But I have realised that this is not the right answer and most people have a much more impressive list of achievements than I do. I hear tales of immaculate gardens, painfully clean houses and drawers Marie Kondo’d (is she a verb now?) to within in an inch of their blameless lives. Aside from the usual mundane chores that are necessary to keep basic life ticking over, all I seem to have done during lockdown is put together a photo book of my last holiday to Southeast Asia.

This may sound like no great achievement to most people, but when you are bordering on obsessive about identifying, selecting, editing, sizing and placing photographs, as I am, then one photo book can take weeks. It’s amazing that anything else gets done at all. Bins overflow and weeds turn into triffids in an attempt to get my attention, but with no success. Then finally I decide I can do no more, place the order, emerge from my fog and wait impatiently for the finished product to arrive.

However, the whole process felt very different this time because I don’t know when I’ll be travelling again. Nothing is booked and there’s no upcoming adventure for me to look forward to with eager anticipation. I also wonder whether we’ll ever travel in quite that way again. Sorting through all those photos made me nostalgic for the way we felt just a few short months ago. It almost seems like a time of lost innocence as I look at us freely walking around in public, eating in restaurants, visiting crowded temples and shopping in busy street markets. We even seemed to be having a good time on the overnight Reunification Express train between Hanoi and Hue and that must have taken some doing. Good company and alcohol definitely helped. As for using our hands to dole out rice from our pots to those poor monks– it doesn’t bear thinking about!

It’s made me think a lot about travel and how I’ve taken it so much for granted. Now that I’m only dreaming about it, I realise that it has been a great privilege to travel to far-off places to experience different cultures and meet people so unlike myself. This strange and unsettling period of our lives will eventually come to an end (the Queen has promised us) and I’m hoping that countries and individuals will have gained new insights from this time and that we act on them. For myself, one of my aims is to travel more mindfully. I don’t mean that I’ll be travelling to Nepal to meditate with saffron-robed monks (although that does sound quite appealing), but I do intend to be much more appreciative of the pleasures of travelling and arriving.

In the meantime, now that my photo book is done, I’m going to spend my time thinking about all the wonderful places I might see one day. Our newspaper is very helpfully providing endless lists of travel writing and podcasts to help me on my way. It certainly beats organising drawers.