One’s Destination is Never a Place, but always a New Way of Seeing Things

We are all heading somewhere aren’t we? Isn’t that destination we are aiming for what the journey is all about? Well not on my campervan trips; for me the journey is the main event. I might have a destination in mind but arriving there isn’t vital if something better turns up on the way and I don’t want the journey to end. For me, a trip is a whole event and is about more than getting somewhere and I concentrate on enjoying every moment, discovering all sorts of thing on the way.

We can never turn back time and change the journey we have made up to now but we can choose the direction we are heading in, the speed we travel at and where we linger on the way. Henry Miller’s quote tells us that by having one place as a destination we could be missing the bigger picture.

In life our target place might be financial independence, a bigger house, a new campervan or a happy-ever-after wedding. They might seem it at the time, but these things are never the end of a journey, they are just lay-bys off the road. Your journey will continue through retirement or marriage or the reality of paying for a bigger house.

Ever since I was young and found the travel section in our local library I have wanted to be a traveller. Even then, as a young teenager, I was drawn to those travel writers who didn’t necessarily have a fixed destination but wandered, and reflected on how the journey had changed them. As a teenager I felt that the small village I lived in was suffocating me and knew it wouldn’t be big enough to contain me. I wanted something that was beyond what I knew and I was sure that there were places where I would find new ways of seeing and being.

My early travelling

I was so excited about my first trip abroad to Austria on a school skiing trip. Safely dipping my toe in a foreign country by travelling with friends and trusted teachers taught me a number of things that have been important in future journeys. I learnt patience as we waited out rail strikes at stations and missed train connections across Europe. I discovered real coffee and delicious Austrian white wine and I gained confidence after managing to use my school-learnt German to buy a roll of film for my camera and coffee and cake in a cafe. I also learnt that being homesick, even over 24-hours away from home at the age of 13-years, was never going to be part of my vocabulary.

Confidence vs anxiety

There is nothing like having a problem in a foreign country and having to communicate with people whose language you hardly speak beyond the usual please and thank you to give you anxiety. Up to now every time we have had to deal with a problem in another country it has related to our campervan. Less urgent things have included buying new tyres and the most extreme incident was the accident in Greece. In every case I have lost sleep worrying about how it will work out and each time we have survived these incidents. I come away both stronger, I know we can deal with anything together, and conversely more fearful, as the list of things that I know can go wrong just grows and grows!

Learning tolerance

Even on the best campsite you are in close proximity to your fellow human beings and you quickly learn to live with your neighbours foibles or risk being frustrated and unhappy. We have had next-door campers who have been noisy [and then I will exercise my assertive skills when I ask them nicely to be quiet] and others who have invaded our small pitch with their stuff. I have met barking dogs and people who are shockingly judgemental. I am generally happiest on empty campsites with no one around but I have learnt to love [or at least tolerate] the breadth of human life and want us all to rub along as best we can.

A New Way of Seeing Things

Travelling to new places exercises our wonderment muscle. Away from home the flowers and trees are different, the weather is new, the houses are unfamiliar, the things in the shops are excitingly different. And so everything takes longer. I will linger over the shopping [something I rarely do at home] and stop to study and photograph flowers and insects. I am curious about the local history and stand in awe at new sights. Coming home, after all that exercise, my wonderment muscle will keep on working and I see all those familiar things as if for the first time.

I am happy that for the moment my journeys continue and my perspective on life keeps shifting.

‘One’s Destination is Never a Place, but always a New Way of Seeing Things,’ is a quote from Henry Miller.