More than road lust
The world is obsessed with travel. And road trips. And camping. We are all suffering from pandemic lockdown overload and the feeling of claustrophobia is suffocating—even if we’ve been weathering the last six months relatively unscathed. Something about getting out on the road, sleeping and rising with nature and simply being free is more urgently sounding a Siren’s call and wild dreamers of all ages and all circumstances are finding it irresistible.
I am one of them.
My fantasy is to travel and have adventures and write about them, somehow kluging together a living as I do. I have had this dream ever since I turned down my high school boyfriend’s invitation to hitchhike with him across the country the summer after graduation as the 60’s became the 70’s–because I knew my family would never speak to me again and I needed their love and approval too much to hear my own voice.
That was a very, very long time ago and in the decades that followed I convinced myself I wanted other dreams—the normal dreams. And I decided to pursue them in the normal ways. But I forgot—or didn’t yet know, that there would always be one unmovable obstacle standing in my way—I just am not normal. I wasn’t created to be.
I kept that dream, to go and have adventures traveling, through every attempt to do what I thought I should. Once I finish college, once I have a career, once I have enough money, once I find my true love, once I solve this immediate crisis and then the next, and the next, and the next—then, then I will turn back to answer the dream.
In the meantime, I followed every impulse down every rabbit hole a creative mind can conjure and felt the blow of a few of Life’s own insidious slings and arrows along the way. Like dealing with breast cancer at a relatively young part of near middle age. And I open my eyes after sleepwalking for decades to find that technology has caught up to my dreams and made them so practical that hordes of GenXers, Millennials, GenZer’s and what ever comes after are already doing it, have already figured it out and raced ahead of me and I am still stuck in dream mode, waiting.
Waiting for what? Permission. The permission no one else could ever give me that I never thought I could give myself.
And then COVID-19 shut the world down and all the restless noise in every corner of life became hushed. I still had work, but everything else that frittered away my attention came to a screeching halt. I’ve been working from home for 10 years. The isolation that was an occasional irritation suddenly became crushing. The lack of things to do and events and people to occupy my time became a restless person’s worst nightmare.
The curtailment of freedom felt oppressive. And the only thing that began to feel at all like a vague remedy is the freedom of the open road. Sleeping with the stars and rising with the sun. And as I watch others live that dream, My Dream, the silence begins to give way to the ghosts of whispers from all the years past as I sift through my experiences like cleaning out a dusty closet.
And it’s still there.
I hate the lockdowns and quarantines, I hate the overreaching curtailment of freedoms, I hate how sickness has taken so many and how it has divided an already divided nation and overflowed into rage and anger and the way it has made us all crazy in a thousand different ways. But maybe, just maybe it has provided me with the one thing I have waited too long to ask for.
Permission.
Permission to make a start.