elastic time

Despite my best intentions, a broadband connection and plenty of free time, I (obviously) haven't updated this page in some time. Ideally, that will change. I'm aiming for at least two updates a week, and hopefully more, as I try to put some of my traveling experiences into written form.


Time plays tricks. The tricks are different when you're constantly traveling, trying to see the highlights in a location then moving onto another, overloading the brain with stimuli.
Tricks especially when a day is split by time on a plane, train or auto into two parts in separate locations. Each city or stop has a place in your brain, rather than each day. Things that happened yesterday morning Germany seem like a long time ago the next day when you're in Scotland.
But as experiences quickly recede into the "past" section of your brain, they also get lumped together. Everything that came before this place happened more or less together, is the impression.
At one point in the midst of the world tour, I stopped, thought, and told someone it seemed like we'd been at our current stop both for a very short time and a long time. Whoever I directed the comment to, someone who was in a stable location in space and time, didn't understand. To them, I was swooping into their life for a few short days before leaving again just like that. To me, the stop had a different quality, as one of many brief stops but also a unique, one-of-a-kind experience (just like all the others).

Now, the whole trip is lumped together in the back of my brain. We're back in the States, unlikely to leave anytime soon, with no exotic destination to look forward to (with no destination of any kind, yet). But I can separate any stop out from the jumble when I think about a specific place, specific people.

The surprising thing to me, now that I'm back, is how easy the return was. I loved the travel. I even loved the moving around every few days, although it was occasionally wearing. I thought I'd have a tough time when it ended.
But more than anything, it seems like my year and a half away from the States was just a pause in my personal flow of time here. Of course, since everyone else's flow of time has continued, I'm resuming my States time a little behind.