Traveling

Traveling is hard. It’s emotionally draining. The actual act of traveling is easy, especially on someone else’s dime. Meals paid for, hotel, maid service, car flights all covered. But leaving your spouse, kids your life behind is hard no matter who you are. You have roots at home, lives, wives, kids, routines, homes, cars, material things. It’s all just a part of life. You take things for granted, until you leave.

You start thinking about how much you miss your life, the everyday things that often seem at times insignificant. You miss those things, crave them. Back home the ones you love miss you equally. They crave you, need you, life isn’t the same without you. It’s very hard to support them from a distance but you do your best, counting the minutes until your return. But it’s easier because you are traveling. You are experiencing new things, meeting new people. Or is it?

Spend long enough in one place and you make connections, co-workers become friends. You enjoy their company; it fills the void. You get involved in your new found friends personal stories, their struggles. You feel for them. If you stay in one place long enough you start to develop new roots, until it’s time to go home. You say goodbye to your new friends, co-workers, acquaintances and go home to the ones you love.

It’s a liberating feeling every time I walk out of a facility I have spent more than a week at. It’s like quitting your job that you adored to move on to better things. It’s bittersweet. Regardless of how emotionally draining traveling is, I still look back on the knowledge, the experiences and think how amazing my life is. I think about how fortunate I am to have these opportunities presented to me, and how lucky I am to have the life I have at home and abroad and the people in it, no matter how long the relationships are and how hard it is to leave them.