“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again –to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” ~Pico Iyer “Why we Travel”

Millie, my red headed graduate friend, sent me this quote via Facebook while I was in France. Recently deciding that graduate school (what she called an “academic bubble”) is not the next course of action for her, she is spending the summer working at Yellowstone National Park and plans on teaching ESL in Japan come fall.

“We are almost exactly on opposite sides of the world *smiley face*,” I wrote back to her. It was ironic. Because of our passion to travel – essentially, because of our distance from the other – we had become closer.

France. London. Europe, in general.

“What’s so great about it,” Ashley, another girlfriend who works with me at Shorewood Country Club, instant messaged me Tuesday evening. It was a few days after I returned back to Dunkirk from my three-week vacation.

Unable to find the words to adequately describe how large and different and awe-inspiring the rest of the world is outside of the “American bubble,” I sent her Millie’s quote.

“Lol [laughing out loud],” she replied. “I like my bubble alright.”

“Lol,” I typed, and sighed to myself, “Yea…most people do.”

I began to upload photos from my trip onto the computer:

My complicated traveling incidents; my French family; the Zoo d’Amnéville (pseudo-famous Amneville Zoo in France); mountain vineyards in Epernay (Champagne region); cathedrals in Germany, Luxembourg and Metz; the London Eye, Parliament and Big Ben; my British friends from Zambia, Israel, South Africa, America, Sudan, India and Turkey; me trying a flaming shooter of Absinthe for the first time and subsequent experiences following that choice.

There it was, my trip wrapped up in a neat, orderly bow. This is what I did and saw: brochure-blue skies; trees and buildings sparkling with yesterday’s leftover raindrops glittering in today’s sun; air that looks new, washed clean; smiles.

The beautiful and tangible are what people generally photograph on vacation. I considered sending these to Ashley.

But, I thought, how do I upload feelings?

After hearing about the way others live (I considered stories about Zambia and how 40 percent of the population has AIDS, about World War II in France and Germany and the flip flopping of nationalities for Alsace-Lorraine natives, about the suffocating blanket of death that covers protesting Iranians, and about how inequality is still detectable even though Apartheid was abolished in South Africa), how do I describe a shift in perception?

How do I show someone the high – something like sherbet being injected into my bloodstream – I couldn’t find at home; the feel of grass-print crisscross patterns from where my dress had twisted up the day I sprawled out in my taunt et oncle’s backyard and did nothing but “be” for awhile; the city’s cool, unpolished rhythms – cars, loud (multi-lingual) conversations, change rattling from a beggar’s cup, the frenetic beeping of a pedestrian signal a few blocks away – still ringing in my ears?

How do I describe to someone that I gorged myself on these feelings with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony? That this hunger was something comparable to falling in love: sudden and astonishing. That I realized I’ve been starving?

“We all live in some sort of bubble,” Millie said once. I agreed – it’s inescapable. “But we owe it to ourselves [and to others] to get out of that bubble every chance we get.”

To find ourselves as we lose ourselves.

Because once you do, there will forever be a nagging feeling – like a tiny and sharp stone lodged in your shoe – reminding you: “there is something more.”

Originally published Sunday, July 8, 2009